LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap._Dsi Copyright No....... 

Shelf. 



L J. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 



The Bible and the Child 



•The^^c 



The Bible and the Child 



B, 

The Very Rev. F. W. Farrar, Dean of Canterbury 
The Rev. Robert F. Horton 

Arthur S. Peake, M.A. 

Professor Walter F. Adeney 
The Very Rev. W. H. Fremantle, Dean of Ripon 
The Rev. Washington Gladden 

The Rev. Frank C. Porter 

And the Rev. Lyman Abbott 



New York , ^ 6 

The Macmillan Company 

London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd. 
1896 

All rights reserved 






V 

V 



a6'< 






Copyright, 1896, 
By The Macmillan Company. 



1 .< 



Norfaaoatr -USregg 

J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 






Contents 
I 

Page 
The Higher Criticism and the Teaching of the 

Young ....... i 

By the Very Rev. F. W. Farrar, D.D., Dean of 

Canterbury. 

II 

The Higher Criticism and the Teaching of the 

Young . . . . . . . 29 

By the Rev. Robert F. Horton, D.D. 

Ill 

The Higher Criticism and the Teaching of the 

Young . . . . . . 51 

By Arthur S. Peake, M.A., Tutor in Biblical Sub- 
jects, Primitive Methodist Theological Institute, 
Manchester, England. 



vi Contents 

IV 

Page 
The Higher Criticism and the Teaching of the 

Young . . . . . . . .69 

By Professor Walter F. Adeney, M.A., Professor of 
New Testament Exegesis, History, and Criticism 
at New College. 



The Higher Criticism and the Teaching of the 

Young ....... 89 

By the Very Rev. W. H. Fremantle, D.D., Dean 
of Ripon. 

VI 

The Bible as Literature . . . . .109 

By the Rev. Washington Gladden, D.D. 

VII 

The Higher Criticism and the Teaching of the 

Young . . . . . . .127 

By the Rev. Frank C. Porter, Ph.D., Professor in 
Yale Divinity School. 



Contents vii 

VIII 

Page 

The Bible as Rearranged by Modern Criticism . 151 

By the Rev. Lyman Abbott, D.D., Pastor of 
Plymouth Church, Brooklyn. 



The Higher Criticism and the Teach- 
ing of the Young 

By the Very Rev. F. W. Farrar, D.D. 
Dean of Canterbury 



The Bible and the Child 



I am asked to say a few words upon a 
subject of real and urgent importance — 
"the right way of presenting the Bible to 
the young in the light of the Higher Criti- 
cism." I gladly accede to the request, 
because an unwise or unfaithful way of 
dealing with the facts forced upon us by 
the advance of knowledge may be prolific 
of deplorable results. 

The change of view respecting the Bible 
which has marked the advancing knowledge 
and more earnest studies of this generation 
is only the culmination of the discovery that 
there were different documents in the Book 



The Bible and the Child 



of Genesis — a discovery first published by 
the physician Jean Astruc, in 1753. There 
are three widely divergent ways of dealing 
with these results of deep research, each of 
which is almost equally dangerous to the 
faith of the rising generation. 

1. Parents and teachers may go on incul- 
cating dogmas about the Bible and methods 
of dealing with it which have long become 
impossible to those who have really tried to 
follow the manifold discoveries of modern 
inquiry with perfectly open and unbiassed 
minds. There are a certain number of per- 
sons who, when their minds have become 
stereotyped in foregone conclusions, are sim- 
ply incapable of grasping new truths. They 
become obstructives, and not infrequently 
bigoted and furious obstructives. As con- 
vinced as the Pope of their own personal 
infallibility, their attitude towards those who 

4 



Very Rev. F. W. Farrar, D.D. 

see that the old views are no longer tenable 
is an attitude of anger and alarm. This is 
the usual temper of the odium theologicum. 
It would, if it could, grasp the thumbscrew 
and the rack of mediaeval inquisitors, and 
would, in the last resource, hand over all 
opponents to the scaffold or the stake. 
Those whose intellects have thus been pet- 
rified by custom and advancing years are of 
all others the most hopeless to deal with. 
They have made themselves incapable of 
fair and rational examination of the truths 
which they impugn. They think that they 
can, by mere assertion, overthrow results 
arrived at by the lifelong research of the 
ablest scholars, while they have not given 
a day's serious or impartial study to them. 
They fancy that even the ignorant, if only 
they be what is called " orthodox," are justi- 
fied in frantic denunciation of men more 



The Bible and the Child 



truthful and incomparably more able than 
themselves. Off-hand dogmatists of this 
stamp, who usually abound among profes- 
sional religionists, think that they can refute 
any number of scholars, however profound 
and however pious, if only they shout " In- 
fidel ! " with sufficient violence. But, as 
the holy Bishop Ken says : 

The older error is, it is the worse ; 
Continuation may provoke a curse. 
If the Dark Age obscured our fathers' sight, 
Must, then, some shut their eyes against the Light ? 

If there were no opposition to critical 
inquiry, except what is of this crude kind, 
it would hardly be deserving of any notice, 
but might be passed over with silent dis- 
dain. There are, however, many true and 
tender souls, incapable of severe studies, and 
wedded to beliefs which they have identified 

6 



Very Rev. F. W. Farrar^ D.D. 

with their holiest hours, who are too old or 
too fixed in opinion to make progress, and 
who, from honest dread lest they should be 
dragged into doubt respecting views dear to 
them as life, cannot get rid of the belief that 
there is something " wicked " in free inquiry. 
Like Cardinal Newman, they think it their 
duty to treat their reason as though it were 
a dangerous wild beast to be beaten back 
with a bar of iron. Ought they not to bear 
in mind the warning of the great Bishop 
Butler that our reason is the only faculty we 
possess by which we can judge of anything^ 
even of Revelation itself? 

Besides this large class of Christian people, 
there are always some who, with the same 
temper of mind, but with more ability and 
knowledge, are ready to supply masses of 
tortuous " harmony " and casuistically plau- 
sible conjecture, which may give a semblable 

7 



The Bible and the Child 



possibility to the old views. The impossible 
and dreary nature of the defence serves to 
deepen in other minds the conviction that 
the cause which needs such arguments is lost. 
I can only say, in my own case, that when, 
more than forty years ago, I came to the 
conclusion that the Book of Daniel, as we 
now have it, could not have seen the light 
before the age of the Maccabees, my con- 
clusion was indefinitely strengthened by read- 
ing Dr. Pusey's treatise in defence of its 
genuineness and authenticity. 

We cannot greatly respect the possibly 
pious but obstinate and illiterate priest who, 
having been accustomed to read the impos- 
sible word " mumpsimus " to his congregation, 
on being corrected indignantly grumbled that 
he was not going to give up " his old c mump- 
simus ' for their new c sumpsimus' : But 
every one should be a little ashamed and 

8 



Very Rev. F. W. Farrar^ D.D. 

afraid to be of those who are the last to give 
up their adherence to opinions which have 
long become naturally obsolete. " There is 
nothing so revolutionary/' said Dr. Arnold, 
" because there is nothing so unnatural and 
convulsive, as the strain to keep things 
fixed, when all the world is, by the very- 
law of its creation, in eternal progress, and 
the course of all the evils in the world may 
be traced to that natural but most deadly 
error of human indolence and corruption, 
that it is our duty to preserve and not to 
improve." A study of the past shows us 
that it has been one of the chief duties of 
each age in succession to cast off the slough 
of old ignorance. The advance of know- 
ledge is a direct work of God's revealing 
power. " God shows all things in the slow 
light of their ripening ; " and since the light 
of all certain knowledge which comes to us 

9 



The Bible and the Child 



from the long results of time is light from 
heaven, how can it lead us astray ? 

This, at any rate, is certain, that if chil- 
dren are still taught to regard as articles of 
their religious belief opinions about the in- 
errancy, universal equal sacredness, verbal 
dictation, or supernatural infallibility of all 
that is contained between the covers of the 
sixty-six books which we call the Bible, the 
faith of those children, if they develop any 
intelligent capacity or openness of mind 
hereafter, is destined to undergo a rude and 
wholly needless shock, in which it will be 
fortunate if much of their religion does not 
go by the board. Some of those Books of 
Scripture are separated from others by the 
interspace of a thousand years. They rep- 
resent the fragmentary survival of Hebrew 
literature. They stand on very different 
levels of value, and even of morality. Read 



Very Rev. F. W. Farrar, D.D. 

for centuries in an otiose, perfunctory, slav- 
ish, and superstitious manner, they have 
often been so egregiously misunderstood 
that many entire systems of interpretation 
— which were believed in for generations, 
and which fill countless folios now consigned 
to a happy oblivion — are clearly proved to 
have been utterly baseless and egregiously 
false. Colossal usurpations, of deadly im- 
port to the human race, have been built, like 
inverted pyramids, on the narrow apex of a 
single misinterpreted text. From the days 
of Origen (a.d. 253) to those of Nicholas of 
Syra (a.d. 1340) the whole science of exegesis 
was stultified by non-natural attempts to read 
into all Scripture a fourfold sense (literal, alle- 
gorical, mystical, spiritual), much of which 
was as absurd as the Jewish Cabbala. 

The old forms of allegorical interpretation 
which, from the days of Philo to those of 

11 



The Bible and the Child 



Bishop Wordsworth, once crowded enor- 
mous commentaries with useless irrelevance, 
would be simply laughed at if they were 
offered to us in these days as though they 
possessed any validity. 

For I see that through the ages one increasing 
purpose runs, 

And the thoughts of men are widened by the pro- 
cess of the suns. 

Of all ways of dealing with " the Higher 
Criticism/' none is more futile, and none 
will more certainly bring its own Nemesis, 
than that which thinks it sufficient to brand 
its followers with charges of wilful faithless- 
ness, and to crush them with impotent 
anathemas, which will only rebound upon 
the heads of those who utter them. 

2. Another way, equally common among 
ignorant and incompetent controversialists 

12 



Very Rev. F. W. Farrar^ D.D. 

of the opposite extreme, is to talk as if the 
Higher Criticism had robbed the Bible of 
all value, and had shown it to be a mass of 
falsity and imposture. Here again it requires 
some knowledge of language, of literature, 
of history, of national idiosyncrasies, to be 
even capable of estimating the real nature of 
a result arrived at. Ignorant and irreverent 
attempts to discredit and vilify the Bible are 
even more egregiously illiterate than the idle 
super-exaltation which would turn it into a 
fetish or an amulet. 

Let me give an instance or two. 

The immense majority of scholars of name 
and acknowledged competence in England 
and Europe have now been led to form an 
irresistible conclusion that the Book of Daniel 
was not written, and could not have been 
written, in its present form by the prophet 
Daniel, B.C. 534, but that it can have been 

13 



The Bible and the Child 



written only, as we now have it, in the days 
of Antiochus Epiphanes, about B.C. 164, and 
that the object of the pious and patriotic 
author was to inspirit his desponding coun- 
trymen by splendid specimens of that lofty 
moral fiction which was always common 
among the Jews after the Exile, and was 
known as "the Haggadah." So clearly is 
this proven to most critics that they willingly 
suffer the attempted refutation of their views, 
which are often very insolent as well as very 
futile, to sink to the ground under the weight 
of their own inadequacy. Even Delitzsch, 
a truly learned man, and "orthodox' 5 by 
every instinct of his mind, after vainly try- 
ing to hold out against modern conclusions, 
found the love of truth too strong within 
him to admit of his continuing to resist argu- 
ments to which he felt that he could furnish 
no valid answer. Those who understand the 



Very Rev. F. W. Farrar y D.D. 

Bible aright find the intelligent faith cleared 
and strengthened by better knowledge of 
the books which they reverence ; but some 
ignorant sceptic gets hold of this conclusion 
about the age of the Book of Daniel, and 
declares to gaping audiences that scholars 
and divines regard the book as no longer 
sacred, but as an unblushing fable and an 
impudent forgery. He does not tell his ill- 
educated hearers that among those who find 
the critical conclusion so irrefragable as not 
to require any further argument have been 
found some of the ablest and most instruc- 
tive commentators on the book, and that 
only by reading it in the light of its true 
date is it possible for us fully to grasp the 
bearing of its moral and spiritual lessons. 
Still less does he see that when he talks of 
"falsity" and "forgery" he is using idle mis- 
judgments and anachronisms, which only 

IS 



The Bible and the Child 



reveal his own incompetence to understand 
the correct significance of literary problems. 
He is judging the methods and views of the 
second century before Christ by the literary 
standards and habits of the nineteenth cen- 
tury after Christ. 

Or let us take the case of the Pentateuch. 
Those who now regard it as a matter of dem- 
onstration that, in its present form, it em- 
bodies the handiwork of at least four different 
writers, and that it contains at least three 
varying strata of legislation, do not, on that 
account, lose one essential element of its 
moral greatness and religious teaching. One 
case may illustrate this. In the Book of 
Leviticus 1 a large space is occupied by the 
arrangements and ceremonies of the Day of 
Atonement, and the way of dealing with the 
scapegoats, and now it is known to all stu- 

1 Lev, xv. 

16 



Very Rev. F. W. Farrar, D.D. 

dents that, except in the Book of Leviticus, 
there is not so much as the dimmest trace 
of any observance of the Day of Atonement, 
not even in passages where, by every law of 
literature and psychology, we should have 
thought it most certain that such allusions 
would be found — not even, for instance, in 
the account* of Hezekiah's or Josiah's Refor- 
mations, not even in the elaborate Levitism 
of the Book of Ezekiel, 1 not even in the 
reorganization of Judaism in the days of 
Ezra and Nehemiah. It is said that this is 
a mere argumentum e silentio ; and they must 
indeed be easily convinced who accept that 
phrase as an adequate reply. Is it, then, 
nothing that what would not naturally have 
been regarded as a central ordinance of reli- 
gion, and as the unique day of the religious 

1 i Kings viii. 27 seq. ; Ezek. xiv. 1 8-20 j Zech. vii. viii. j 
Ezra ill. 1, 6 ; Neh. viii. 13-17. 

c 17 



The Bible and the Child 



year, should not so much as once be alluded 
to in the entire religious literature of the 
nation, and that the first allusion to the only- 
instituted fast-day in the Jewish year should 
be in an Apocryphal Book — Ecclesiasticus 
— in the third or second century before 
Christ ? It is, to me, almost humiliating to 
see on what slight straws of a mere phrase 
many will be content to rest the weight of 
great conclusions. Would any one be able 
to persuade us that the festivals of Christmas 
and Easter had been from the early days 
among the most sacred of Christian festivals, 
if not a trace of them, not an allusion to 
them, were to be found in a thousand years 
of Christian literature ? On this ground, 
then, alone, is it not inevitable that many 
should be led to doubt whether the Day of 
Atonement can be proved to have been origi- 
nally of Mosaic origin? And how much 

18 



Very Rev. F. W. Farrar, D.D. 

more if that inference is strengthened by 
many quite different, yet converging, lines 
of argument, all tending to the same conclu- 
sion ? But, supposing that we are unable to 
resist this inference, in what single respect 
does it weaken our sense of the deep and 
blessed symbolism enshrined in the ordi- 
nances of that unique day in the Jewish 
year? Is one moral or spiritual lesson about 
the exceeding sinfulness of transgression, and 
the mercy of God, and the gracious revela- 
tion of God's forgiveness of sins to the sin- 
cerely penitent, in any way weakened or 
dimmed by holding that the institution of 
the scapegoats and the blood of sprinkling 
originated at a later rather than at an earlier 
date ? Is the light of revelation granted to 
mankind only in intermittent flashes at inter- 
vals of millenniums ? Or, rather, is the Spirit 
of Man the candle of the Lord, and is there 

19 



The Bible and the Child 



a Light that lighteth every man that is born 
into the world ? 

3. There is a third way of treating the 
Higher Criticism — even more common than 
either of the other ways, less unwise, perhaps, 
but still undesirable. It is simply to ignore 
all critical results. This, however, is not so 
easy, and at the best it is but the ostrich 
policy which tries to bury its head in the 
sand in order to escape its pursuers. Modern 
discoveries are already beginning to be rec- 
ognized in books written for the use of the 
young which are indispensable to the Biblical 
teacher. If children are left unaware that 
the views of those most competent to rep- 
resent their generation are widely different 
from those which were all but universal in 
the days of their grandfathers, the discovery 
will certainly come to them later on, and 
may come so suddenly as to imperil their 

20 



Very Rev. F. W. Farrar, D.D. 

faith. If overgrowths of alien ivy are suffered 
to become too dense and vigorous, and to 
thrust their fibres into the interstices of every 
stone, then, when it is necessary to tear them 
away, it is often found that they have seri- 
ously injured the stability of the building 
which they were originally intended to adorn ; 
have too long been suffered to injure and 
enshroud. If we would save the building 
from destruction and decay, we must cut 
away the ivy directly we begin to perceive 
how injurious may be its effects. 

If, then, the methods (i) of denunciation, 
(2) of exaggerated misapplication, and (3) of 
silent ignoring be unwise, what should be the 
attitude of parents and teachers to the Higher 
Criticism ? It has always been my humble 
endeavour to speak without any subterfuge 
and with perfect plainness, and though space 
forbids me from developing the subject here, 

21 



The Bible and the Child 



I hope that the following brief remarks and 
aphorisms may be found serviceable by the 
thoughtful and the sincere. 

I. We should be profoundly and un- 
swervingly truthful. We ought never to 
practise that falsitas dispersatura> that "econ- 
omy of truth," which found favour among 
some of the Fathers, and has often been an 
avowed principle of action in the Church of 
Rome. Truth is too sacred a thing to admit 
of manipulations or juggling. Traditional- 
ism, or professionalism, or self-interest should 
never for a moment be suffered to obscure 
our sense of its eternal obligation. We are 
not bound to teach children all we know, but 
we are most solemnly bound not to teach 
them anything which we feel to be doubtful 
as though it were certain, and still more are 
we bound not to teach them anything of which 
we ourselves begin to suspect the reality. 

22 



Very Rev. F. W. Farrar, D.D. 

II. Into a vast part of our teaching, by 
far the largest and most important part of it, 
no question of the Higher Criticism enters 
at all. The object of the best and most 
sacred Bible teaching is to form the character, 
not to store the intellect. It is moral ; it is 
spiritual ; it has to do with things eternal ; 
it far transcends all minor questions of the 
date or historicity of the books in which it 
is enshrined. Does a child fail to grasp the 
meaning of the parables of Christ though he 
is told that these are not necessarily founded 
on real incidents, but are cc tales with a pur- 
pose " ? Why, then, should it be different 
with the stories, say, of Balaam or of Jonah ? 
There is a remarkable book by Dr. H. Oort, 
written in Dutch by a pupil of the great 
Professor Kuenen and under his supervi- 
sion, called The Bible for the Young. It has 
been translated into English, and goes much 

23 



The Bible and the Child 



further, on many points, than I should 
myself go ; but it is a learned and most 
interesting book, and it demonstrates that 
there need be no evaporation of one of the 
best lessons of Scripture even in the hands 
of teachers who are advanced votaries of the 
Higher Criticism. Not even the most timid 
need make a bugbear of recent results. They 
become harmful to the cause of "sound 
learning and religious education " only when 
they are glaringly misused by their adherents 
or by their antagonists. 

III. The manner in which the Higher 
Criticism has slowly and surely made its 
victorious progress, in spite of the most 
determined and exacerbated opposition, is a 
strong argument in its favour. It is exactly 
analogous to the way in which the truths 
of astronomy and of geology have triumphed 
over universal opposition. They were once 

24 



Very Rev. F. W. Farrar, D.D. 

anathematized as " infidel "; they are now 
accepted as axiomatic. I cannot name a 
single student or professor of any eminence 
in Great Britain who does not accept, with 
more or less modification, the main conclu- 
sions of the German school of critics. In 
Germany itself, the land of laborious and 
devoted study, there are scores of learned 
professors, and among their entire number 
there is said to be only one — and he a man 
of no name — who clings to the old " tnump- 
sinius" Truth is great, and will prevail. 

IV. Our knowledge of Scripture will not 
remain stationary now any more than it has 
done in the past. On the contrary, there 
never was an age in which we were more 
likely to be led to new truths of interpreta- 
tion than this. For in this age the increase 
of all sources of information has been un- 
precedented, and we can now read the Bible 

25 



The Bible and the Child 



in the light of a philology, a literary breadth, 
an acquaintance with comparative religion, 
and an insight into history and psychology, 
such as have never been equalled in any past 
century. We are not using the language of 
boastful arrogance, but of profound gratitude 
to Him who is the Light, the Truth, and 
the Way, when we say of this generation, 

We are heirs of all the ages, in the foremost files 
of Time. 

We should do well, then, to take to heart 
the wise warnings of four great and holy theo- 
logians who lived before the Higher Criti- 
cism was even dreamed of — Hooker, Bishop 
Butler, Richard Baxter, and J. Robinson. 

" Whatsoever is spoken of God, or things 
appertaining to God," says Richard Hooker, 
" otherwise than truth, though it seems an 
honour yet it is an injury. And as incredi- 

26 



Very Rev. F. W. Farrar, D.D. 

ble praises given unto man do often abate 
and impair the credit of their deserved com- 
mendation, so we must likewise take great 
heed /est, in attributing to Scripture more than 
it can have, the incredibility of that do cause 
even those things which it hath most abundantly 
to be less reverently esteemed?* 

" And here/' says the great and good Rich- 
ard Baxter, " I must tell you a great and 
needful truth, which Christians, fearing to con- 
fess, by overdoing, tempt men into infidelity. 
The Scripture is like a man's body, where 
some parts are but for the preservation of 
the rest, and may be maimed without death" 

" I am convinced," said the pastor John 
Robinson, in his farewell address to the Pil- 
grim Fathers before they sailed in the May- 
flower from Delft Harbour, " that the Lord 
hath yet more light and truth to break forth 
from His Holy Word." 

27 



The Bible and the Child 



And Bishop Butler thought it " not at all 
incredible that a book which has so long been 
in the possession of mankind should contain 
many truths as yet undiscovered." 

V. To conclude, then, no one who fear- 
lessly loves and follows the truth will have 
the smallest difficulty in co-ordinating the 
teachings of Scripture — and all the more in 
proportion as he wisely loves the Bible — to 
the results of modern inquiry. He will still 
be able to say with the large-minded Quaker 
poet of America : 

We search the world for truth ; we cull 
The good, the pure, the beautiful ; 
From graven stone and written scroll, 
From all old flower-fields of the soul. 

And, weary seekers of the best, 
We come back laden from our quest, 
To find that all the sages said 
Is in the Book our mothers read. 
28 



II 



The Higher Criticism and the Teach- 
ing of the Ypung 

V 

By the Rev. R. F. Horton, D.D. 



II 



To some of us it is a matter of amaze- 
ment that the misunderstandings — I will 
not venture to say the misrepresentations — 
connected with this subject should be so 
persistent and obstinate. It taxes all our 
charity to find men, good men, presumably 
religious men, continuing to discuss the ques- 
tion in a spirit of blind and uninquiring 
prejudice. They will not take the trouble 
to learn what it is, about which they so con- 
fidently affirm. With a scorn which is the 
twin-sister of ignorance, they seek to stamp 
out truth by humiliating and deriding its ad- 
vocates. Were ever the genuine advocates 
of truth so intemperate, so denunciatory, 
so blind, and so ignorant as the men who 

3 1 



The Bible and the Child 



have been loudest in the outcry against the 
Higher Criticism ? The only parallel in his- 
tory is the tone of the Pope — the infallible 
Pope — and even the Pope is nowadays more 
courteous. I hope it is not a severe judg- 
ment, but I believe this tone of anger and 
vehement anathema is only found, and can 
be only found, when men are defending 
positions which in their hearts they suspect 
to be insecure. When the foundations are 
suspected, the defenders will use any device 
to prevent an examination of them. If you 
propose to rest your religion on an infallibil- 
ity of any sort, the only chance is to surround 
your infallibility itself with an inviolable 
ring which forbids criticism, and to resent 
any suggestion of doubt, dealing with it as 
impiety to be denounced, and not as argu- 
ment to be met. Now, what is the issue in 
this long and excited controversy? It is 

32 



The Rev. R. F. Horton, D.D, 



simply this : Are we required to accept the 
Bible — just as it stands — as the voice of 
God in such a sense that to question any of 
its assertions is blasphemy, or to examine the 
composition of its books is an offence against 
the Holy Spirit who wrote it? Or, on the 
other hand, are we permitted and even re- 
quired to study the books, and find out all 
we can about them, in just the same way that 
we deal with other literature, and then allow 
the voice of God to speak to us as it will 
through the books thus studied and under- 
stood? 

The old orthodoxy, which these angry 
critics still accept, decided the question in 
the first way. The Bible from Genesis to 
Revelation was a smooth, consistent voice 
of God, like a Delphic Oracle. One was to 
read it as God's letter to the human race. If 
you came across any contradictions or incon- 

D 33 



The Bible and the Child 



sistencies, you were to attribute these to your 
own feebleness of apprehension, but never 
allow that there could be anything wrong in 
the book. Piety was to be proved by show- 
ing that the inconsistencies were harmonized. 
If, for example, it said in 2 Chron. xvii. 6 
that Jehoshaphat " took away the high places 
and the Asherim out of Judah," and then 
in Ch. xx. 33 > " howbeit the high places were 
not taken away," it was a proof of reverence 
to the infallible word to show how the high 
places were both taken away and not taken 
away by Jehoshaphat because "the Word 
of God " cannot be broken. If in reading 
the Bible you came across sentiments of fierce 
retaliation or deeds of savage bloodthirsti- 
ness, against which a man of ordinary moral- 
ity might naturally revolt, it was your duty 
to justify these sentiments because they were 
the Word of God, and to find excuses for 

34 



The Rev. R. F. Horton, D.D, 



the deeds because they were recorded with- 
out censure in the Word of God. You were 
not allowed to argue that because the senti- 
ment was not godly it could not come from 
God, or because the deed was unchristian it 
could not be approved by God. That was 
treated as presumption, as judging God, as 
setting up the intellect against its Maker. 

This was and is the decision of the old 
orthodoxy. And what is its result ? Plym- 
outh Brethrenism on the one hand, and infi- 
delity on the other. It is this view of the 
Bible which has enabled the infidel publica- 
tion, Reynolds' Newspaper , to regale its Sunday 
readers lately with columns of extracts from 
the Bible which run counter to even a worldly 
man's sense of righteousness, as the "Word 
of God." If the Plymouth Brethren account 
of the Bible is correct, Reynolds' Newspaper is 
justified. As to the honesty of Reynolds in 

35 



The Bible and the Child 



assuming that Plymouth Brethrenism is the 
religion of Christendom, and ignoring that 
no man of scholarship or education holds the 
view of the Bible which would justify this 
procedure, I will say nothing, for that is a 
side issue. But while the loudest and most 
vehement defenders of the Bible persist in 
advocating this impossible view, infidelity 
will have a thousand weapons ready to its 
hand. 

Now I venture on the assertion that the 
result of criticism has been to take all these 
weapons out of the hand of every honest 
sceptic. When Reynolds, or any other infi- 
del teacher, bases his attack against the Bible 
and Christianity on this unintelligent view 
of the Bible, he convicts himself of igno- 
rance. He starts from premises which no 
one grants — I mean no one but Plymouth 
Brethren and the small number of Christians 

36 



The Rev. R. F. Horton, D.D. 



who have set themselves against the fair 
examination of the Bible. The simple fact 
is that this old view of the Bible is not justi- 
fied by any assertion of the Bible itself, 
unless some misquoted and misapplied texts, 
which even ignorance hesitates to cite, are to 
carry the day ; texts just as much misquoted, 
misapplied, as those which are supposed to 
support the Papacy ; nor is that old view 
supported by any external authority of 
Church or Council, or even unbroken tra- 
dition. It is not consistent with the use 
which the New Testament writers made of 
the Old; and it goes to pieces, like a 
mummy brought into the fresh air, directly 
any unbiassed mind begins to study and 
examine the Bible to see exactly what it is. 

Now, of course, I am not contending that 
the critics are right in their conclusions ; all 
I say is that they are justified in their meth- 

37 



The Bible and the Child 



ods. Not only are we allowed, we are liter- 
ally required, before the Bible can give its 
real message to the world, to bring every 
resource of scholarship, the examination and 
collation of manuscripts, the emendation of 
the text, the consideration of authorship and 
style, the internal evidences of dates, the wit- 
ness of archaeology and history, and above 
all the developed system of Christian life 
and teaching, to settle the exact bearing, 
relation, and authority of each book and each 
section of the Bible. Unless and until this 
is done, the Bible may be wrested by selected 
citation, by ignorant confusion of dates, and 
purposes, and application, or by an arbitrary 
method of allegorizing, to teach just what 
each man wishes it to teach. And in place 
of the Divine Truth, which must be one and 
absolute, you have every man his own exe- 
gete, and every exegete his own Pope ; and 

38 



The Rev. R. F. Horton, D.D. 



presently, as the system develops, you have 
the world rising up impatiently against these 
myriads of petty Popes, as it did once before 
against the imposing, though effete, single 
Pope. The answer to Popery is not that 
private judgment which makes every one an 
authority entitled to speak ex cathedra from 
the Bible, but that free, honest, and reverent 
study of the Scriptures, aided by all the best 
scholarship of the age, which tends more and 
more to make Biblical Theology an intelli- 
gible and progressive system, and in its 
highest Christian development a final test 
and authority in religion. 

It is no answer to the critical method to 
prove that Wellhausen has made mistakes — 
the critical method is not bound up with the 
infallibility of Wellhausen — or that Cheyne 
is arbitrary in fixing the dates of the Psalms. 
The only real refutation of it would be to 

39 



The Bible and the Child 



furnish some proof from the Bible, or from 
God, that we are forbidden to make these 
candid inquiries into the structure of the 
literature ; or, if you will, to show that the 
Christian religion is injured instead of being 
cleared and strengthened by the fearless use 
of those faculties which God has given us 
for the discovery of truth. Neither of these 
has been done. Indeed, I will venture to 
close with an illustration, which is one of a 
thousand easily adducible, to show how relig- 
ion gains, if orthodoxy suffers by the candid 
work of criticism. 

Let us turn to the 137th Psalm. I sup- 
pose no one was ever so far blinded by tradi- 
tion as to think that David was its author. 
It tells its own tale. It was written five 
centuries after David's time, by an exile in 
Babylon. But according to the traditional 
orthodoxy, this exile psalmist was the pen- 

40 



The Rev. R. F. Horton, D.D, 



man of the Holy Ghost. He uttered the 
sentiments which God breathed into his 
heart, and told him to commit to writing. 
Any of these verses might therefore be 
quoted as the Word of God. That was the 
theory. And consequently it must be re- 
garded as a beatitude pronounced by God 
on any man who should take the little inno- 
cent Babylonian children and dash them 
against the rock. It is not a sentiment that 
seems suitable in the heart of the Father of 
our Lord Jesus Christ ; and the old ortho- 
doxy must bear its own responsibility for 
maintaining a dogma which made such a 
conclusion inevitable. But there was a 
greater difficulty still. The Lord had 
spoken through Jeremiah, xxix. 7, com- 
manding the exiles to seek the peace of 
Babylon, and to pray to Him for it. How 
could the same God have breathed into the 

41 



The Bible and the Child 



exile psalmist this cruel and bloodthirsty 
sentiment ? 

I need not labour the point to prove how 
religion gains, how the truth of God gains, 
how Christ's view of God is established, by 
a mode of handling the Bible which emphati- 
cally denies that this bitter thought of the 
exile was God's thought at all, a mode of 
handling the Bible which, instead of treat- 
ing every passage in the Bible as the Word 
of God, seeks diligently to find and under- 
stand the Word of God, which is unquestion- 
ably there. 

The Higher Criticism, we may depend on 
it, is of God, and whatever is to be said of 
individual scholars, the method must prevail, 
to the lasting benefit of religion, of the 
Church, and of mankind. 

When it is once realized that the result of 
criticism has been, and will be still more, 

42 



The Rev. R. F. Horton, D.D. 



not to lessen but to intensify the spiritual 
value and the teaching power of the Bible, 
it will be the plain duty of both parents and 
Sunday-school teachers to start in the in- 
struction of their children from the position 
which criticism has securely established. The 
baseless dogma about the nature of the Bible 
must not be given to the children ; the Bible 
itself must be given. But more. Not only 
must the Bible itself be given, but it must 
be given with so clear and convincing an 
explanation of what the Bible actually is, 
that children may escape the "sunless gulfs 
of doubt " into which we and our fathers 
were plunged. 

I mentioned Psalm cxxxvii. as an instance 
of the spiritual illumination and the clearing 
of the ethical teaching, which may be gained 
by fearlessly applying criticism to Scripture. 
I was very much affected by the words of a 

43 



The Bible and the Child 



dear old friend, a faithful and loving Christian 
from his boyhood, who told me how a diffi- 
culty of many years' standing had been re- 
moved by my exposition of this Psalm. How 
could it be otherwise ? What miserable con- 
fusion must be wrought in the mind of a child 
if he is taught that the awful imprecation — 

Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy 
little ones against the rock. 

is the Word of God ! It is impossible, in 
the face of such an error, to give children a 
true idea of the God and Father of our 
Lord Jesus Christ. 

Nor can I forget the storms of unbelief to 
which I was subjected as a boy in preparing 
the Book of Judges for a Cambridge Local 
Examination. 

No pastor or master ever hinted to me 
that the deeds of treachery or blood in that 

44 



The Rev. R. F. Horton, D.D, 



book, wrought by men on whom the Spirit 
of God was said to have come, were not 
approved by God Himself. I supposed 
that the dastardly deed of Jael was relig- 
iously praiseworthy, and that Samson must 
be a character that we should do well to 
copy. 

I know, of course, that a large proportion 
of the boys brought up with me on the 
same principles of Biblical interpretation 
have actually become unbelievers — or, at 
least, callously indifferent to the Bible. A 
few like myself have been saved from that 
melancholy fate by the revealing light and 
truth which, under the hand of diligent 
critics, " have broken forth from the Word " 
in the last twenty years. 

And if I may be pardoned another per- 
sonal reminiscence, the first shock to faith 
which I received in Oxford was not from 

45 



The Bible and the Child 



the so-called unbelief, or from the philo- 
sophical speculations, of the University, but 
from preparing the Book of Acts for the 
entrance examination. It was in a shady 
room, looking out on the loveliness of the 
New College gardens, that I was confronted 
by the fact that the speech of Gamaliel re- 
ferred to certain predatory outbreaks which 
did not occur until after the date of his 
speech. If I had encountered such an error 
in Thucydides or Livy, it would not have 
shaken my confidence in those great his- 
torians ; but to meet with a historical slip 
in an Infallible Book shook the whole un- 
tenable foundation of my faith. I speak, 
therefore, from my own experience of sor- 
rowful and unnecessary shocks to the relig- 
ious life when I plead that a true view of 
what the Bible is should be placed before 
children from the beginning. 

46 



The Rev. R. F. Horton, D.D, 



I think I must also mention an inci- 
dental injury which a wrong conception of 
the Bible has wrought in the training of the 
young. The unreality and tedium of much 
Sunday-school teaching, which issue in the 
children leaving early and imbibing a per- 
manent dislike to the Christian Church, must 
have an explanation. It is easy to lay the 
blame at the door of the teachers. It is in- 
admissible to charge the fault on the Bible 
itself. Surely the mistake lies in the con- 
ception of the Bible which most teachers are 
themselves taught, and feel in their turn 
bound to teach. They have to smooth over 
and explain away the moral incongruities or 
the historical discrepancies of Old Testa- 
ment scriptures. They have to give an 
allegorizing meaning to passages which in 
the original intention could have had no 
such meaning. For instance, a worthy cor- 

47 



The Bible and the Child 



respondent assured me, some years ago, that 
Esther was to him the most precious of 
books, because after much prayer it had 
been revealed to him that Ahasuerus is Al- 
mighty God, Mordecai our Lord Jesus 
Christ, and Haman the Devil. My cor- 
respondent is the editor of a widely read 
newspaper and represents the orthodox ideas 
of Bible interpretation. But to teach chil- 
dren a view of that kind is fatal. It not 
only must destroy all respect for the Bible ; 
but also, what an idea of God must it give 
them if they are to see Him in the arbitrary 
and sensual Persian king, or what an idea of 
our Lord if they are to interpret Him by 
the hard and cruel character of that bitter- 
hearted Jew ! As for Haman, I am ready 
to admit that he may present a plausible 
portrait of the Devil ; but it would leave on 
the child's mind the impression that the 

48 



The Rev. R. F. Horton, D.D. 

Devil has been hanged, which is unfortu- 
nately not true. 

May I conclude by commending to Sun- 
day-school teachers two admirable pam- 
phlets written by Charles Edward Walch, of 
Hobart, Tasmania ; one on Sunday-school 
teaching, the other on Gospel sickness. 
The second of these is published by James 
Clarke and Co. They are full of sense 
and religion; they show how an earnest 
Sunday-school teacher had himself discov- 
ered the need of Biblical criticism before 
he had become acquainted with its work; 
and they suggest that a new day of vital 
interest in the Sunday-school and in the 
home teaching of children will begin when 
the true view of the Bible has become gen- 
erally known and accepted. 

Meanwhile, every child should be taught 
from the first that the Bible is a compila- 
e 49 



The Bible and the Child 



tion of many different books, written by 
different authors and at widely distant 
periods of time. He should be taught 
that these books constitute a rough record 
of the stages by which God has been re- 
vealed to the world, and of the difficulties, 
the doubts, the rebellions, which His gradual 
self-revelation has encountered among men. 
No word should be said about the Bible 
being infallible, for the term is wholly mis- 
leading. And every effort should be made 
to show that Christ is the end of the law, 
so that the teaching should rather be what 
Christ is, has done, and is doing in the 
world to-day than the slow and dubious 
steps by which the world was prepared for 
His coming. The latter is a necessary 
study for theologians. The former alone 
is needed for, and is capable of, riveting the 
attention of our little children. 

5° 



Ill 



The Higher Criticism and the Teach 
ing of the Young 

By Arthur S. Peake, M.A. 

Tutor in Biblical Subjects, Primitive Methodist Theological 
Institute, Manchester 



Ill 



Among the awkward questions that the 
Church has to face we must set that of 
the best methods to be chosen in bringing 
before our young people the results of 
Biblical criticism. To some it is not awk- 
ward at all, either because they are unaware 
of the attainment of such results or because 
they roundly refuse to believe in them. 
Others will not entertain it, on the too 
popular principle, "Why can't you let it 
alone ? " Those of us who are satisfied 
that real results have been won, and that 
for the advancement of the faith it is vital 
that they should not be kept back from our 
young people, cannot acquiesce in a con- 
spiracy of silence. However awkward, the 

S3 



The Bible and the Child 



question is most pressing, and on the way 
it is answered much of the future depends. 
There is not even this excuse for silence, 
that if we say nothing they will hear noth- 
ing. The truth is quite otherwise. They 
will hear much that is crude and garbled, 
but roughly effective none the less, and if 
they hear it all unprepared, their position 
is dangerous indeed. They have learnt no 
defence, and believe that Christianity is hit 
in a vital place. How much better if they 
already know, and know better than those 
who flaunt these things in their face, what 
the results of criticism really are, and know, 
too, that their feet are planted on a rock 
of certainty which no criticism can shake. 
If I may repeat a phrase I used in an article 
some years ago, criticism "has drawn the 
fangs of the secularist lecturer"; perhaps I 
ought to add : only he is not aware of it. 

54 



Arthur S. Peake, M.A, 



In other words, criticism has swept away- 
many of the things most chosen by the 
Secularists for attack. It is our privilege 
to place our young people at the right point 
of view, and preserve a faith which shall 
not be incompatible with intellectual integ- 
rity. We must vaccinate them with criti- 
cism to save them from the small-pox of 
scepticism. 

When we pass to the methods to be 
employed, it will be readily seen that the 
question is largely one of presuppositions. 
We find a set of ideas about the Bible 
already in possession when we begin our 
work. Children in Christian homes form 
their views of the Bible from the reverence 
always paid to it, its use in family worship 
and in the Church, and all the other indi- 
cations that it is to be regarded as a book 
quite sacred and apart. Why it should be 

55 



The Bible and the Child 



so treated they hardly know; it is taken 
for granted as part of the natural order of 
things. They know nothing of Inspiration. 
I remember when I was eight years old read- 
ing some of The Antiquities of Josephus. I 
was very much interested, and said, " Why, 
this is just like the Bible." I was told 
that Josephus was not inspired. What with 
the child is unreasoning acceptance becomes 
with the boy or girl intelligent acceptance, 
but on grounds received without question. 
In this state of mind good and bad elements 
mingle, and the good probably predominate. 
It is highly important that the Bible should 
be reverenced as the record of the revela- 
tion and redeeming activity of God, that it 
should be set above all other books, and 
indeed placed in a unique position. But it 
is not well that this should be held to 
involve extravagant claims for the Bible — 

56 



Arthur S. Peake, M.A. 



claims beyond what it makes for itself or 
beyond what can be established by sound 
proof. Yet these are almost universal, and 
constitute the great difficulty of the teacher. 
The first thing to be done, if our young 
people are to be taught the critical view of 
the Scriptures, is to destroy their illusions. 
And this will be done by various lines of 
proof. I scarcely venture to suggest what 
order should be followed, but I will name 
some of the points it is necessary to prove. 
The corruption of the text both of the Old 
and New Testaments must be urged to 
prove that Providence has not attached so 
much importance to the exact transcription 
of the words of the autographs as to secure 
miraculous immunity from errors of copy- 
ists. This may be used with great force 
against the doctrine of verbal inspiration, 
and it should be shown that in many cases 

57 



The Bible and the Child 



the best scholars are not agreed as to the 
true reading. Another thing that should 
be insisted on is that there is no orthodox 
doctrine of Inspiration, in other words, there 
is no doctrine to which the Church is com- 
mitted. This may be shown by pointing 
to the great variety of view that has pre- 
vailed on the subject, and, therefore, since 
the question is not closed, we must claim, 
as Protestants, the right of private judgment 
upon it. In this connection it is well to 
adduce the example of the leaders of the 
Reformation, Luther and Calvin, who treated 
the Bible with considerable freedom. Next 
it might be shown that the popular view of 
the Bible has largely come to us from the 
rigid scholastic theologians of the seventeenth 
century, whose conclusions in some other 
departments of theology we are almost 
unanimous in rejecting. It might then be 

58 



Arthur S. Peake, M.J. 



pointed out that they came to their doctrine 
of Scripture in an a priori way, and formed 
it with very little reference to facts. The 
essential irreverence of this method should 
be brought out in that it presumed to form 
a theory of what God must have done, in- 
stead of humbly setting to work to discover 
what He had actually done. Over against 
this false method, which has given us the 
popular view, the true scientific and histori- 
cal method should be set. The teacher 
should make it clear that the only satisfac- 
tory way is not to spin theories out of one's 
own inner consciousness, but to set to work 
patiently to investigate the phenomena which 
the Bible presents, and form the doctrine as 
a result of the investigation. It might be 
well to enforce this by instances, from other 
departments of knowledge, of the ignomini- 
ous end of passionately defended a priori 

59 



The Bible and the Child 



theories. Another illusion, which is per- 
sistent and troublesome, is what is known 
as the " all or nothing " doctrine. It springs 
directly from the popular view that the Bible 
is a whole, of equal authority and of equal 
inspiration from end to end. If a single 
error is admitted, the Bible cannot be in- 
spired at all. This is often very difficult 
to deal with, and the teacher cannot be too 
careful in his treatment of it. Once this 
has been cleared away, the path will be com- 
paratively easy. The proof of the falsity 
of this position should come from several 
sides. The most important thing is to 
show that for the purpose for which it is 
assumed that the Bible was given, such 
errors in matters of fact as are alleged are 
unimportant. The moral and religious 
value remains unimpaired. This might be 
illustrated by those numerous passages in 

60 



Arthur S. Peake, M.A. 



both Old and New Testaments which speak 
to us with such an immediate and authentic 
Divine voice, that they carry with themselves 
proof of their own inspiration. In this way 
the impression of inspiration does not depend 
on perfect historical accuracy, as to which 
we could never from the nature of things 
be sure of our ground, but on the conviction 
that the voice of God alone could say such 
things to us. The testimony is that of our 
own religious consciousness. In this way 
the belief in inspiration will be placed on 
a firmer basis, while it will be detached from 
such an accretion as a belief in inerrancy. 
The "all or nothing" argument may be 
met in another way by pointing out the 
unfairness with which it treats the Bible. 
If a man discovers a blunder in his daily 
paper, he does not jump to the conclusion 
I have heard formulated with reference to 

61 



The Bible and the Child 



the Bible in this way : " If all of it ain't 
true, there's none of it true." A man should 
treat his Bible as fairly as he treats his news- 
paper. It is unfair in another way. We 
have no right to expect of the Bible more 
than it professes to give. And it makes no 
claims to inerrancy. On another side an 
effective appeal may be made to Christian 
loyalty. We cannot place the words of any 
one on the same level as the words of Christ. 
This helps us to recognize distinction of 
value in various parts of the Bible, and the 
argument may be reinforced by illustrations 
of the fact that some portions of the Bible 
speak much more directly to our souls than 
others. It is also of great importance to 
emphasize the fact that the Bible is not a 
book, but a collection of books, gradually 
formed, and fluctuating in extent so that 
even now Protestant scholars cannot regard 

62 



Arthur S. Peake, M.J. 



the limits that should be set to the Canon 
as fixed beyond dispute. These may serve 
as hints of the way in which this difficulty 
should be met. 

The removal of illusions is only one, 
though the most important, part of the pre- 
liminary work. It should be supplemented 
by the positive proof that the position taken 
up is better in itself. These are some points 
that should be made clear. Criticism has 
made the Bible more precious to us because 
it has made it intelligible and interesting. 
It has made the uniqueness of the religion 
of Israel and of Christianity stand out with 
far greater clearness. It has driven us to 
Christ, the only "impregnable rock," as our 
supreme religious authority. It has thus 
withdrawn apologetics from the useless task 
of defending shattered outworks to the invin- 
cible fortress itself. And if it be urged that 

63 



The Bible and the Child 



the authority of Christ guarantees the tra- 
ditional authorship of Old Testament books, 
it must be said in reply that the Incarnation 
involved a surrender of omniscience that He 
might be like us in all things except sin, and 
that even if His knowledge on these points 
transcended that of His own time, it would 
have been to cast a needless stumbling-block 
in the way of His hearers to discuss critical 
questions with them. The relation in which 
the Son stands to the universe did not cause 
Christ to reveal the secrets of nature, which 
our own age has so largely discovered, nor 
to correct the astronomical errors of His 
contemporaries. 

One point more may be briefly mentioned. 
It is of great moment that while the teacher 
is conducting his class over this delicate 
ground he should make abundantly evident 
his own devotion to Christ and the Gospel. 

64 



Arthur S. Peake, M.A. 



The practical problem that presents itself to 
the pupils is : If I revise my views of the 
Bible, how do I know that I shall not end 
by giving up Christianity ? Nothing will 
reassure him more than the feeling that the 
teacher is a living example of the reconcilia- 
tion of faith with criticism. 

So much for the preliminaries. It is so 
much, because they are the most important. 
Who should the teacher be ? In most cases, 
I think, the minister — that is, where he has 
been sufficiently conscientious to give earnest 
study to the subject. I have further assumed 
that a class will be formed for the systematic 
study of the subject. Such a course as I 
have already sketched will take some time, 
and then the actual teaching of the subject 
will begin, and will need continuous work. 
As a rule, critical questions should be let 
alone in the pulpit. They may unsettle the 
f 65 



The Bible and the Child 



faith of older Christians who are unable to 
distinguish between form and substance ; and, 
apart from this, the pulpit is meant for 
another purpose. The class might consist 
of any who wished to join, but I think it 
would be prudent to admit none under four- 
teen, and perhaps that limit is too low. A 
text-book is badly wanted, and till a satisfac- 
tory one appears each teacher must make his 
own. Professor Robertson's The Old Testa- 
ment and its Contents might be used at a 
pinch, but those who are not satisfied with 
a halfway house will prefer to wait for some- 
thing more critical. The question of the 
New Testament is less pressing. Dr. Dods' 
Introduction to the New Testament or Mr. 
M'Clymont's The New Testament and its 
Writers^ would do as a text-book. Common 
sense will indicate the necessity of placing 
only those results before a class, which are 

66 



Arthur S. Peake, M.A. 



generally accepted by critics. As to the 
order, I should suggest that the Hexateuch 
be taken first, since here the work has been 
most completely and perhaps most finally 
done. If I were writing for students who 
wished to examine the subject for them- 
selves, I should recommend a different 
order, but this will, I think, be found best 
in this case. There is no need to sketch an 
outline of study ; a teacher who knows his 
subject will find the line that suits him best. 
But, on another point, is it too much to ask 
of the officials and Church that if they can- 
not help they will at least not hinder the 
work ? They cannot be more anxious for 
the welfare of the young people than the 
minister. And in his efforts to keep them, 
by making Christianity credible to them, 
they may rest assured that he will not play 
fast and loose with the essential truths of 

67 



The Bible and the Child 



the religion in which, in common with them- 
selves, he finds his highest inspiration and 
joy. The wisest policy is to trust him and 
let him take his own' course. We are in a 
time of change, and the only thing which 
will preserve the unity of the Church is the 
love that " hopeth all things " and " believeth 
all things/' even the orthodoxy of the minis- 
ter who is a critic. 

68 



IV 



The Higher Criticism and the Teach- 
ing of the Young 

/ 

By Walter F. Adeney, M.A. 

Professor of New Testament Exegesis, History, and Criticism 
at New College. 



IV 



I have no doubt that to many readers the 
suggestion that the Higher Criticism should 
be brought into any connection with the 
teaching of children must seem about as 
absurd as a proposal that Quain's Anat- 
omy should be made up into reading- 
lessons for an infant class. The very 
association of the phrases is almost as in- 
congruous as, say, the pairing of a whale 
with a violet. It should be remembered, 
however, that when we refer to the teaching 
of children we are not always thinking of 
the ABC lessons of lisping babes. There 
is more difference in mental grasp between 
a child of four years and a boy or girl of 
fourteen than there is between the latter and 

7i 



The Bible and the Child 



a man or woman of forty. Even young 
children have an awkward habit of spring- 
ing upon us, in the most unconscious inno- 
cence, questions which persons who are 
acquainted with the results of the latest re- 
search can only answer honestly in the light 
of that research. This is the point. It is 
not to be supposed that any sensible people 
are eager to transform the rising generation 
into an army of critics. The judgment is 
the latest faculty to ripen ; with some of us 
it seems to remain green for a lifetime. To 
urge the exercise of it prematurely is only to 
rear an ugly crop of prigs. 

What, then, have children to do with the 
Higher Criticism ? I should say that their 
relation to it is concerned with the results 
rather than with the processes. Let us 
clearly understand what we mean by this 
often repeated phrase, "the Higher Criti- 

72 



Walter F. Adeney^ M.A. 



cism." The angry style in which it is 
handled by the more ignorant of those peo- 
ple who take upon themselves to heap in- 
discriminate denunciation upon it, would 
seem to imply that it was simply an indica- 
tion of the self-conceit of its authors, who 
meant by the use of it that their critical 
methods were superior to the methods of 
less advanced students. A more ridiculous 
misinterpretation can hardly be imagined. 
Of course, as every student of its first ele- 
ments knows, the Higher Criticism is not 
so named as being better than an inferior 
criticism that it affects to despise, but sim- 
ply in contrast with another kind of criti- 
cism, which is equally valid in its sphere — 
the lower criticism concerning minute ques- 
tions of the settlement of the original text, 
etc., and the higher passing on to inquire 
into the age, authorship, character, and ten- 

73 



The Bible and the Child 



dency of the books it concerns, as far as 
these can be ascertained from an examina- 
tion of their contents. Surely no reasonable 
person can object to such a study being pur- 
sued, although it is quite open to any com- 
petent person to say that it is erroneously 
carried on by some of its disciples. One 
thing, I think, may now be affirmed in 
regard to this matter. There are whole 
reaches of inquiry that have been so thor- 
oughly surveyed that we can no longer treat 
them as lying in the mists of uncertainty. 
The fog has lifted over these regions, so 
that we can see their outlines. In other 
cases, where perhaps w T e were once accus- 
tomed to think we could discern the capes 
and bays of a sharply marked coast-line, 
the powerful telescope of criticism may 
prove that we were only gazing at a bank 
of clouds. That cannot but be an unsatis- 

74 



Walter F. Adeney, M.J. 



fying result to arrive at ; and yet our per- 
sonal disappointment is no excuse for 
smashing the telescope. At all events, it 
is best to know the facts. Then the ques- 
tion arises, If we know the facts, what reason 
or justification have we for continuing to 
teach children just as we did before we had 
reached them ? I have no wish to perplex 
and puzzle children with abstruse questions ; 
but I feel the grave mistake of ignoring the 
fairly established results of criticism. We 
may not be able to explain Kepler's laws to 
young children, but that is no excuse for 
doggedly persisting in representing to them 
that sun, moon, and stars all revolve round 
the earth. 

One of the commonest mistakes about the 
Higher Criticism is that it only issues in 
a mass of dreary negations. I am by no 
means ready to take a brief for every person 

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The Bible and the Child 



who chooses to style himself a critic. There 
are men who come to the consideration of 
Biblical problems with a marked prejudice 
against the transcendental, the spiritual, 
everything that is not in agreement with 
everyday London club life — men who are 
so obviously blind to the religious wonder 
of revelation that they put themselves out 
of court at once when they set forth their 
arid negations. Their criticism is as uncriti- 
cal as Jeffreys's criticism of Wordsworth. 
By every word they utter they prove them- 
selves to be inhabitants of another world 
from that of the inspired writers, and there- 
fore utterly unfit to present themselves as 
their judges. There are men, too, with 
whose character and temper we may have 
no reason to quarrel, and yet who are mani- 
festly so extravagant and one-sided that 
what they give out as critical results must 

7 6 



Walter F. Adeney, M.A. 



only be accepted by us as obiter dicta. But 
when a full discount has been allowed for 
all these eccentricities and irrelevances, there 
remains a heavy balance to the credit of 
sound criticism, the accumulated returns of 
the labour of a number of sober workmen 
whose converging harmony of opinion can- 
not be brushed aside without impertinence. 
Now here it is that we find results that are 
by no means all negative. The mining is 
not all for the shaking of ancient founda- 
tions ; the best of it is carried on in new 
fields for the discovery of hidden treasure, 
and with the result that already we have 
been presented with some precious nuggets 
of gold. 

Is it nothing that this criticism has quick- 
ened our interest in the Bible — that it has 
given new life especially to the Old Testa- 
ment? Some of us who would still fain be- 

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The Bible and the Child 



lieve we are young men, can yet recollect the 
time when there was a manifest danger of the 
Old Testament falling altogether into neglect 
among the more progressive teachers of Chris- 
tian truth. In the present day the study of 
the Old Testament has come to be courted 
with the keenest interest. Criticism has 
thrown new light upon the history of Is- 
rael. Formerly the writings of the Hebrew 
prophets were handled as though they were 
so many scattered Sibylline leaves. Now 
they are made to discourse eloquently of the 
ages from which they sprang, and to reclothe 
their authors with the flesh and blood of 
real life. There is no reason why children 
should not have their share in these happy 
gains so far as they are able to appreciate 
them. Then as we pass on to the New 
Testament we have still larger and richer 
results of sound criticism. The critical com- 

78 



Walter F. Adeney^ M.A. 



parison of the Synoptic Gospels one with 
another and with St. John's Gospel has led 
to such a clear understanding of the life and 
teachings of Jesus Christ as was probably 
never before reached in the history of Chris- 
tendom. Until quite lately it was customary 
to mix up sayings of our Lord with texts 
from any of the epistles, not to mention Old 
Testament quotations, as though they all ran 
on the same plane, to the confusion of any 
character and specific meaning. Now we are 
able to see the teaching of Jesus in its own 
crystalline clearness. That is an infinite 
gain. It is much, too, that the latest criti- 
cism has demonstrated the essential unity of 
that teaching as it appears in all the four 
Gospels. At the same time, we are able to 
detect the different standpoints of the several 
evangelists, and, when we come to the apos- 
tles, to see their several ways of presenting 

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The Bible and the Child 



the Gospel, each characteristic, each valuable. 
The truth itself is better apprehended when 
seen in these various lights than it was when 
all differences were blurred by the artificial 
contrivances of the harmonists. Thus the 
New Testament lives to us with a crispness 
of outline and a vividness of colour which 
it owes to the clarifying processes of criticism. 
Is there any reason why children should not 
be introduced to these fresh and interesting 
results ? 

But now if criticism has yielded us these 
profits, it cannot be denied that it has unset- 
tled some old-established positions, and here 
we come to the crux of the matter. The 
first question will be, How are we to deal 
with the narratives of the earliest times in 
the light of criticism? To be simply silent 
about them is to take the feeblest course im- 
aginable. Though it may not be desirable 

80 



Walter F. Adeney, M.A. 



to set them as formal Sunday-school lessons, 
just as if they were on a level with the Gos- 
pel story, to throw them aside altogether 
would be to follow a counsel of despair. To 
put the matter on the lowest ground, a per- 
son who has grown up in ignorance of such 
time-honoured narratives must be held to 
be uneducated. Moreover, the beauty, the 
charm, the moral and religious significance of 
many of these stories will win the hearts of 
children in the future as they have won the 
hearts of children in the past. This winsome 
grace of the antique stories is one of the 
proofs that they are presented to us with the 
power and life of Divine inspiration. We 
cannot afford to lose sight of them, say what 
the critics may about them. The child's 
Bible would be sadly impoverished if these 
favourite parts were to be missing. But let 
the stories be given in their quaint old-world 
G 81 



The Bible and the Child 



simplicity. When we are dealing with those 
concerning which we may think historical 
grounds of assurance cannot be made out, it 
will be misleading to drag in allusions to 
modern geographical and archaeological data. 
The stories should be set by themselves, 
framed in their own mystery. As soon as 
the children are able to understand it, they 
should be informed quite simply, and with- 
out any painful sense of reserve, that they 
are different from the later history, because 
the books in which they are recorded were 
not written till many hundreds of years after 
the times to which they refer. Children soon 
have to learn how all history begins among 
the mists of uncertainty, in the dim ages of 
a far-off antiquity. They know this with 
regard to the story of Britain, and it does 
not make them sceptics of the history of the 
Norman and Tudor lines. If they are told 

82 



Walter F. Adeney, M.A. 



that possibly King Arthur was a myth, they 
are not thereupon so confused as to doubt 
the landing of William the Conqueror. 
These points of difference would be above 
the comprehension of very little children ; I 
am not now referring to such, but to boys 
and girls of some growth in intelligence. 
Take, for instance, the story of Adam and 
Eve. To know nothing of this would argue 
gross ignorance; and it is better to come 
upon it in the grand simplicity of its original 
form in Genesis than to meet with it for the 
first time clothed in Milton's strange mingling 
of Puritan theology and sensuous poetry. 
This story is not only touched with antique 
charm; it is replete with profound lessons 
concerning man, his sin, and his fate — les- 
sons which, coming to us as we receive them 
in the austere simplicity of the primitive nar- 
rative, awe us with a sense of the Divine. 

83 



The Bible and the Child 



Yet I suppose very few educated people take 
this narrative as prosaic history. Then why 
should children not be told that it is an old 
tale teaching great lessons, and not an account 
of the way things actually happened ? 

The case of the patriarchs is not of the 
same kind. I must confess that I am old- 
fashioned enough to cling to the stories of 
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ; and certainly 
we have had gleams of light from the desert 
and the monuments that suggest points of 
verification. Still, it cannot be denied that 
the rearrangement of the Pentateuch has 
raised questions in many minds as to grounds 
of certitude concerning these narratives. 
Similarly, the new order in which the records 
of the Pentateuch are now arranged cannot 
but affect the whole story of the tabernacle 
in the wilderness. The plain statement about 
these things is that the narratives in their 

84 



Walter F. Adeney, M.A. 



present form were written so many hundreds 
of years after the events occurred that we can- 
not be as certain about them as we are about 
contemporary records. I do not see any 
reason why we should not say this to children 
who are old enough to understand what is, 
after all, a very simple statement. It will be 
objected that this is a dangerous position, but 
I venture to affirm that a furtive and timor- 
ous reserve is a far more dangerous one. 

If, however, criticism touches the New 
Testament, it is natural to inquire with more 
anxiety as to what are its effects. Here we 
have come out into broad daylight, and the 
answer can be given with more assurance of 
finality. But here, too, criticism brings us 
nothing to fear. The effect of the most 
searching and ruthless inquiry is that the 
central Figure of all history and all religion 
stands out with a new clearness of outline, 

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The Bible and the Child 



and at the same time with a commanding 
majesty, nay, with the awfulness of true 
Divinity, so that we are constrained to ex- 
claim with Thomas, " My Lord and my 
God." After that what do the details mat- 
ter ? Yet these details are useful in filling 
up the background of the canvas. Now 
it is not so much the Higher Criticism as 
a mere ordinary literary criticism that has 
brought to light certain small inconsistencies 
in the several Gospel narratives. These are 
puzzling to the historian, whose business it 
is to settle every disputed point in the story, 
but they are of no religious importance what- 
ever. The dangerous thing is to attempt to 
smother them up under a confusion of words. 
The simple, natural, straightforward course is 
to admit them without perturbation ; for it is 
not the inconsistency in the narrative but the 
perturbation in the teacher that upsets the 

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Walter F. Adeney, M.A. 



child's faith. If children were not brought 
up with an unfounded belief in the verbal 
inerrancy of the Bible, these discrepancies 
would run off them as water from a duck's 
back, admittedly real, but incapable of pene- 
trating to the deep regions where faith lives 
and where doubt may be bred. I was almost 
saying that those people who so deliberately 
set the terrible stumbling-block of verbal 
inerrancy in the path of Christ's little ones 
are themselves in danger of the millstone ; 
but I know they are acting from the best 
motives as the friends of the children. Still, 
what a huge blunder they have fallen into, 
and how disastrous are its consequences ! 
They believe themselves to be defenders of 
the faith ; but their feverish anxiety seems to 
be engendered by the unwholesome effluvia 
of a decaying creed. Faith can look the 
whole world in the face and welcome light 

87 



The Bible and the Child 



from every quarter, knowing that the founda- 
tion standeth sure. When we feel the Spirit 
of God breathing on us from the pages of 
the Bible, we may regard the work of criti- 
cism with equanimity, having the satisfying 
inward assurance that no arguments can touch 
our one supreme, indubitable fact. Without 
this perception it matters not what becomes 
of the battle of the critics ; at best it can 
but issue in one more literary verdict with 
which to cumber the libraries of the learned. 
Above all, if we have a settled faith in 
Christ, confirmed by the experience of the 
Christian life, we might as well imagine that 
some new theory was about to filch the sun 
from our sky as fear that any criticism could 
ever rob us of our Lord. If this is the 
right position to take up, surely it is our 
business to lead children into it by the 
straightest course possible. 

88 






The Higher Criticism and the Teach- 
ing of the Young 

By the Very Rev. W. H. Fremantle 
Dean of Ripon 



The Higher Criticism is often supposed 
to mean negative criticism, but it really means 
the criticism, not of texts, but of the under- 
lying ideas of a work. It is, therefore, much 
more congenial to the faithful and Christian 
teacher than the Lower Criticism, which deals 
with manuscripts and readings. Of the works 
of Lachmann or Tischendorf, or of Westcott 
and Hort, on the text of the New Testament, 
only a few scholars can judge; but of the 
questions raised by Ewald or Kuenen we can 
all judge. Could the Book of Deuteronomy, 
they ask, which assumes that there is only 
one altar, and vehemently condemns worship 
in the High Places, have been in existence 
when Samuel, the chosen leader and inspired 

9* 



The Bible and the Child 



prophet, sacrificed at the High Place in 
Ramah ; or could the words, " Who saith 
of Cyrus, Thou art my shepherd, saying to 
Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built, and to the 
Temple, Thy foundation shall be laid," have 
been written by Isaiah one hundred and fifty 
years before the Temple was destroyed, and 
two hundred before Cyrus reigned ? Of 
such questions, I say, we can all of us judge. 
And, further, we are all of us unconsciously 
among the "higher critics" when, for in- 
stance, we read Psalm cxxxvii., and ask 
whether the words, " Happy shall he be that 
taketh and dasheth thy little ones against 
the stones," express the mind of the Divine 
Spirit, or whether they belong to a class of 
ideas and feelings which have been done 
away in Christ. Here Christian faith is 
itself the Higher Criticism. 

Such questions are sure to be asked as the 

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Very Rev. TV. H. Fremantle 



child grows into the man or woman, and it 
is of the utmost importance that we should 
so teach the Bible that they may not prove 
a fatal stumbling-block. The late M. Taine, 
one of the foremost writers and thinkers in 
France, became a Protestant because he felt 
sure that if his children were taught the 
literalisms which, in the hands of French 
priests, made the Bible a tissue of incredi- 
bilities, they would, as they grew up, cast 
away their religion, whereas the sane explana- 
tions of the excellent pastors Bersier and Hol- 
lard, to whom he intrusted them, would make 
possible a continuance of belief. We may 
well ask ourselves whether the cause of the 
alienation from Christian faith is not often 
this, that we have bound up with religion 
during childhood a number of ideas which 
the adult finds to be untenable, but from 
which he finds it impossible to disentangle it. 

93 



The Bible and the Child 



This danger may be to a great extent 
obviated by showing that what is paramount 
in the Scriptures, as explained by criticism, 
is the religious interest. Take the question 
of the books of the law, on which so much 
criticism has been expended. The higher 
critics have mostly come to the conclusion 
that Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus 
contain successive handlings of the law, the 
rudiments of which came from Moses, just 
as the Psalms have their source in David, 
but they believe that each re-editing of the 
law has a distinctly religious purpose. On 
this, therefore, the teacher should fix the 
child's attention. He should show how 
stress was laid in each epoch upon the points 
most needful for the religious life : first, in 
Exodus, for the primitive social life of the 
nation ; next, in Deuteronomy, for the final 
struggle against idolatry in the period from 

94 



Very Rev. W. H. Fremantle 



Hezekiah to Josiah ; and, lastly, in Leviticus, 
for the time after the captivity, when the 
sense of sin and the need of sacrifice were so 
fully developed. It is not necessary to go 
into minute criticism with the young ; but it 
is a distinct gain to the teacher, say in read- 
ing Deuteronomy, to be able to describe the 
"hill-altars" and the " Asherim " existing in 
every corner of Judaea, and the degradation 
of the worship of God as described by Hosea 
and the early prophets, and thence to show 
the need of the limitation of sacrificial wor- 
ship to the central sanctuary at Jerusalem. 
And, similarly, it is a gain to realize the state 
of mind of the Jews in the great revulsion 
from idolatry under Ezekiel and the second 
Isaiah, and to associate the lamentations for 
national apostasy which we find in Nehemiah 
ix., or Psalms cvi., or the denunciations of 
Leviticus xxvi., with the passionate longing 

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The Bible and the Child 



for atonement with God which brought into 
prominence the priestly code of Leviticus. 

The Psalms and the prophets and histories 
are comparatively easy to deal with in the 
light of criticism. In the histories the chief 
difficulties are caused by various traditions 
which have been placed side by side, as in 
the varying accounts of the elevation of Saul 
to the kingdom, and of David's introduction 
to Saul. When these are frankly admitted, 
as they would be in any other case, the diffi- 
culty is gone, but the religious lesson is un- 
impaired. As to the Psalms, the dates and 
construction of them are still sub judice; but 
this is of little concern for their religious 
bearing. They are of all ages, and give voice 
to the universal needs of the human soul. 
The criticisms, however, of Cheyne, which 
show that they have a national as well as an 
individual bearing, should be of use to us in 

96 



Very Rev. W. H. Fremantle 



training the young to public and social duty, 
which is among the greatest needs of our 
time. As to the prophets, criticism has 
made them stand out as vivid, struggling 
personalities, their words gaining force from 
the clearer disclosure of the special circum- 
stances of their time. How much more real 
does such an utterance as that of Isaiah lxiv. 
10, ii, become — "Zion is a wilderness, 
Jerusalem a desolation ; our holy and our 
beautiful house, where our fathers praised 
thee, is burned with fire" — when we think 
of it as springing warm from the heart of the 
great unknown prophet of the exile as he 
depicted with patriotic sorrow the actual state 
of desolation, than when we try to conceive of 
it as written two hundred years before, in the 
time of Hezekiah, when the Temple stood 
firm and Jerusalem was unscathed by fire. 
Let us now pass to a different sphere, that 
h 97 



The Bible and the Child 



of the narratives which have created most 
controversy. Take the account of the Crea- 
tion. If we believe it to be a poetic vision 
of the upgrowth of the world under the hand 
of God, we can surely make the pupil under- 
stand this. To be sure, children are, as 
Goethe said, "inveterate realists," and are 
sure to ask, " Was it all true ? " But the 
great religious lessons — the universe a great 
unity, the manifestation of one principle, one 
agent, and that the Holy One ; the world 
prepared for man, who is to master it and 
use it according to God's will ; the spiritual 
element supreme over the material, the con- 
secration of the whole by its issue in a Sab- 
bath of holy rest; man made after God's 
image, his innocence as the witness that sin 
is not a necessary part of his nature, the 
sanctification of human love and family and 
social life by the blessing on the first parents 

98 



Very Rev. W. H. Fremantle 



of the race — all this is so preponderant, and 
in the hands of an earnest teacher can be 
made to stand out so clearly, that the mere 
process of creation falls naturally into a sub- 
ordinate place. 

This may rightly lead us to consider the 
attitude which we should take towards the 
miracles of the Old Testament. We should 
dwell on the Divine purpose and its result, 
not upon the particular mode of working. 
The word "miracle/' as used in Scripture (put 
Paley aside), is quite undefined, and simply 
implies to the religious mind a wonderful and 
striking fact which makes us realize the pres- 
ence of God. On the action of God, there- 
fore, we should fix the attention. Take the 
account of the deliverance of Israel by the 
passage of the Red Sea. We may take 
the old precritical view which made even 
Matthew Arnold speak of the narrative as 

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The Bible and the Child 



instinct with supernaturalism, or we may, 
with the Speaker s Commentary, take it as 
wholly natural. The latter is surely the 
most vivid and attractive ; we see, and make 
the pupil see, the sea driven back by the 
strong east wind, the storm-cloud helping 
the Israelites by its lightnings, but beating in 
the faces of their enemies, the sun as the eye 
of God looking forth in the morning watch 
from the pillar of cloud, and the tide return- 
ing in its strength. Yet upon none of these 
in themselves must the attention be fixed, 
but upon the combination of all these forces 
under the hand of God for the deliverance 
of Israel. We need not be anxious to ex- 
plain the processes through which God 
wrought, either as identical with or as differ- 
ing from the processes known to human 
experience. What we want to impress is the 
sense of God working out His righteous and 

IOO 



Very Rev. W. H. Fremantle 



loving purpose, whether in ways within or 
in ways beyond our comprehension. And, 
further, we want to make the pupil realize 
that the wonder of old time is the heightened 
or concentrated example of that which is in 
its essence repeated day by day in the action 
of God towards us. Even now, with all our 
advance in knowledge, how little do we 
know of the secret forces of nature ! The 
saying of Newton is still true, that we are 
like children picking up shells on the shore 
of an ocean whose depths are unexplored. 
Our philosophers have to speak of an 
"energy" which is the source of all action, 
yet is in its essence unknown. We may, 
therefore, with entire frankness, adopt in our 
teaching such words as those of the Psalm- 
ist : " Thy way is in the sea, and Thy paths 
in the great waters, and Thy footsteps are 
not known." 

IOI 



The Bible and the Child 



There are, we must admit, some stories in 
the Bible which we cannot take literally, 
such as that of the axe-head swimming at the 
word of Elisha, or the three children in the 
fiery furnace. But a tactful teacher will 
know how to get over the difficulty. In 
some cases he will pass it by, as the Germans 
say, " with light foot," especially where, as 
in the first of these instances, no spiritual 
lesson is directly connected with it. In 
other cases, as in the second of these in- 
stances, he may rightly say that, the story 
being told after three hundred years, it is 
quite possible that its details have been 
altered, but that in any case it represents an 
instance, such as has often been known, of 
faithful confessors delivered from a cruel 
death ; and he may thus suggest what is the 
real religious use of the story to us — that 
God's people are constantly passing through 

102 



Very Rev. W. H. Fremantle 



the "smoking furnace" (Gen. xv. 17; com- 
pare Deut. iv. 20, 1 Kings viii. 51), and 
are like the bush bathed in fire, which has 
suggested the motto of the persecuted 
Church, "£/ tamin non consuniebatur" 

A similar mode of treatment may be 
adopted as to the moral difficulties of the 
Old Testament ; they must in some cases be 
avoided, in some cases explained. But here 
we are on firmer ground, having the plain 
declarations of our Lord himself to guide us. 
He admits the doctrine of development in 
moral matters. What was " said to the men 
of old times " needed to be corrected by 
what He said. Moses gave laws for the 
hardness of men's hearts which He repealed. 
The disciples were not to imitate Elijah in 
calling down fire from heaven. We need 
not scruple, therefore, to tell our children, 
as they are able to bear it, that expressions 

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The Bible and the Child 



like the long curses of Psalm cix., ending 
with " Let this be the reward of mine adver- 
saries from the Lord," could not be allowed 
in the mouths of Christians. With the 
younger children such passages may best be 
left unread, and in devotional exercises they 
must not be introduced. I presume that 
few pastors who have free choice would 
dwell upon them in the congregation ; and 
I think that when these passages are set 
down to be read in the appointed order in 
church, the liberty which the law now gives 
to vary the Psalms under special circum- 
stances may be held to justify the exclusion 
of expressions of hatred. Our congregations 
contain persons of all classes and all ages, 
and we must beware of suggesting to young 
or old what will be certainly perplexing, and 
may lead to deadly error. 

It is in the teaching of the Old Testa- 

104 



Very Rev. W. H. Fremantle 



ment that the difficulties chiefly arise which 
it is the design of these papers to meet. 
But there are difficulties also in the New 
Testament ; and though these are not so 
numerous, they are aggravated by the fact 
that the critical results are far less clear. 
The time at which the Gospels were com- 
posed, the account to be given of the wide 
variations and the minute agreements of the 
first three Gospels, and of their relation to 
one another and to the fourth Gospel, are as 
yet undetermined. On the other hand, many 
of the discrepancies which have perplexed 
pious souls, and which have been met by 
strange evasions or attempts at reconcilia- 
tion, become non-existent to us as soon as 
we put aside the fictitious assumption of an 
exact accuracy in the narratives. We can 
then say : It matters nothing whether Christ 
healed two blind men going out of Jericho, 

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The Bible and the Child 



as St. Matthew reports, or one blind man 
coming into Jericho, as St. Luke states ; or 
which of the versions of the title upon the 
cross, which is given differently by each 
evangelist, is the true one. We hardly ask 
such questions in the case of other books, 
but are content to say : " These are different 
versions, slightly varied, of the same trans- 
action." There is no difficulty in saying 
the same as to the Gospel accounts, either 
to ourselves or to our children. What is 
more difficult is to make them understand 
the state of human nature which existed in 
Palestine in our Lord's time and long after 
— a state in which leprosy and hysterical 
affections and demoniacal possession were 
common phenomena, and in which, there- 
fore, the presence of a Divine personality 
must produce effects to which our later 
Western life presents hardly any analogy. 

1 06 



Very Rev. W. H. Fremantle 



But something of this kind must be sug- 
gested in order to prevent in later years a 
sense of unreality besetting the subject and 
obscuring the character and teaching of 
Christ. 

In conclusion, I think that our own re- 
ligious experience on these subjects is our 
best guide in teaching. If we are thoroughly 
persuaded of the main results of modern 
criticism, and have rearranged the Bible in 
our own minds as the history of an orderly 
development culminating in Christ, the true 
Prince of mankind, and if this has fortified 
our own faith by a sense of historical veracity, 
we need not fear to speak plainly to the 
young ; for we can hardly fail to convey to 
them the consciousness that the religious 
aim is paramount with us, and that we wish 
it to be so with them. When they can 
realize that, through the results of criticism, 

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The Bible and the Child 



Christian piety and zeal are not slackened 
but increased, and that both the Old Testa- 
ment history and Christ himself are made 
to stand out in clearer outline, the danger 
lest light and truth should in maturer life 
come to them as destructive and disinte- 
grating powers will have passed away, and 
we may trust that the Bible will grow to 
them more real and more precious the more 
their knowledge and experience extend. 

108 



VI 



The Bible as Literature 

By the Rev. Washington Gladden, D.D, 



VI 



The Bible is the book of religion, but it 
is also, by eminence, the book of literature. 
Well may we call it The Book ; it is the 
prolific mother of books ; since the invention 
of printing, the book-makers have been busy, 
a good share of their time, in producing 
Bibles, and books about the Bible. 

The influence of our English Bible upon 
our language in keeping our speech simple 
and direct and unstilted is beyond all com- 
prehension. Euphuistic dandyism and John- 
sonese magniloquence have been slain by its 
homely eloquence ; and not only have thirsty 
souls with joy drawn the water of life by its 
aid from the wells of salvation, but scholars 

in 



The Bible and the Child 



and writers of books have drawn the fresh- 
ness and grace of literary form from its pure 
well of English undefiled. It is scarcely an 
exaggeration to say that our greatest English 
writers have been the men who best knew 
their Bibles. John Bunyan read almost no 
other book, and he contrived to write a book 
of which, it is said, more copies have been 
printed than of any other English book ex- 
cept the Bible itself. Of men as far apart 
in their view of life as Byron and Ruskin, it 
could with equal truthfulness be said that 
their mastery of style is largely due to their 
perfect familiarity with the English Bible. 

Complaints of the Bible as archaic and 
uncouth in its literary form have not, indeed, 
been wanting ; and some of the most amus- 
ing books in the language are those which 
have undertaken to remedy this defect. A 
translation of the New Testament published 

112 



The Rev. Washington Gladden, D.D. 

in New England in 1833, by an Episcopal 
clergyman, exhibits in its introduction the 
need of such a reconstructed Bible. "While 
various other works/ 9 says the translator, 
"and especially those of the most trivial 
attainment, are diligently adorned with a 
splendid and sweetly flowing diction, why 
should the mere uninteresting identity and 
paucity of language be so exclusively em- 
ployed in rendering the Word of God ? Why 
should the Christian Scriptures be divested 
even of decent ornament ? Why should not 
an edition of the heavenly institutes be fur- 
nished for the reading-room, saloon, and 
toilet, as well as for the church, school, and 
nursery ; for the literary and accomplished 
gentleman as well as for the plain and unlet- 
tered citizen ? " This is what this fine 
writer essays to do, and a few samples of the 
way he does it may be instructive : 
1 113 



The Bible and the Child 



When thou art beneficent, let not thy left hand 
know what thy right hand performs. 

Contemplate the lilies of the field, how they 
advance. 

At that time Jesus took occasion to say, I en- 
tirely concur with thee, O Father, Lord of heaven 
and earth. 

Every plantation which my heavenly Father has 
not cultivated shall be extirpated. 

Salt is salutary ; but if the salt has become vapid, 
how can it be restored ? 

Be not surprised that I announced to thee, Ye 
must be reproduced. 

For this the Father loves me, because I gave up 
my life to be afterwards resumed. No one divests 
me of it, but I personally resign it. I have au- 
thority to resign it, and I have authority to resume 
it. 

There are numerous apartments in my Father's 
temple ; if not, I would have informed you. 



114 



The Rev. Washington Gladden, D.D. 

This will serve as an illustration of the 
kind of writing to which, for long periods, 
we might have been delivered, if it had not 
been for the better model, always in the 
hands of the common people, of the strong 
and simple Saxon of our English Bible. 

Most true is the contention of Matthew 
Arnold that, although the Bible is the book 
of religion and the book of conduct, we can- 
not draw from it the religious and the moral 
truth of which it is the treasury unless we 
treat it as literature. Literature it is, beyond 
all controversy, and not science, nor phi- 
losophy, nor theology. Grievously do we 
abuse it when we take its phrases as theo- 
logical formulas, and undertake to piece 
them together in what we call systematic 
theology. "To understand that the lan- 
guage of the Bible is fluid, passing, and 
literary, not rigid, fixed, and scientific, is the 

"5 



The Bible and the Child 



first step," says Arnold, "towards a right 
understanding of the Bible." It is a step 
which many theologians have never taken. 
If our Sunday-school teachers could get 
possession of this truth, a good foundation 
would be laid for a spiritual and vital the- 
ology. And then it would be well to go a 
little deeper and try to comprehend the fact 
that all language is an instrument which man 
has devised for himself — a tool which he 
has fashioned, and is all the while reshaping 
for his uses ; that it is necessarily imperfect 
and fallible — never, at its best estate, an 
instrument of precision ; and that the best 
we can hope for is an approximation to the 
perfect utterance in words of spiritual reali- 
ties. That profound discussion of the nature 
of language in the introduction to Dr. Bush- 
nelPs God in Christ should be carefully 
studied by every one who tries to interpret 

116 



The Rev. Washington Gladden, D.D. 

the Bible. In the application of what are 
called the exact sciences — as, for example, 
in engineering — it is often necessary to 
repeat measurements or tests a great many 
times, and take the average of results that 
greatly vary. And in the expression of 
highest truth by means of human language 
the same method must be employed. The 
thing has to be said over, many times, in 
many ways ; one analogy after another must 
be suggested, one aspect after another con- 
sidered, until, by comparison and combina- 
tion of all these impressions, the mind 
reaches something like a complete appre- 
hension. " If we find the writer," says Dr. 
Bushnell, " moving with a free motion, and 
tied to no one symbol, unless in some popu- 
lar effort or for some single occasion ; if we 
find him multiplying antagonisms, offering 
cross-views, and bringing us round the field 

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The Bible and the Child 



to see how it looks from different points, 
then we are to presume that he has some 
truth in hand which it becomes us to know. 
We are to pass round accordingly with him, 
take up all his symbols, catch a view with 
him here and another there, use one thing 
to qualify another, and the other to shed 
light upon that, and by a process of this 
kind endeavour to comprehend his antago- 
nisms, and settle into a complete view of his 
meaning." This is an excellent statement 
of what is meant when it is said that the 
Bible is literature, and must be studied as 
literature in order to be understood. 

But while the spiritual and moral content 
of the Bible is always the main subject of 
our study the Bible is well worthy of our 
attention also on account of its literary form. 
It was the architectural splendour of his capi- 
tal, no doubt, that the poet was thinking of 

118 



The Rev. Washington Gladden, D.D. 

when he wrote : " Out of Zion, the perfec- 
tion of beauty, God hath shined forth." If 
the beauty of architecture is one medium by 
which he may be manifested, the beauty of 
the moving epic, the rhythmic ode, the 
stately oration, the sparkling epigram, is 
another and a far more perfect medium. 
The literary beauty of the Scriptures is not 
an accident ; beauty is an essential element 
of all divine revelation, and as such deserves 
our most reverent study. 

What Professor Moulton describes as 
" literary morphology " is a matter of inter- 
est, and the attempt which he has made, in 
his recent volume entitled The Literary Study 
of the Bible to give us some account of 
the leading forms of literature preserved for 
us in the Scriptures — to show us "how to 
distinguish one literary composition from 
another, to say exactly where each begins 

119 



The Bible and the Child 



and ends ; to recognize epic, lyric, and other 
forms as they appear in their Biblical dress, 
as well as to distinguish literary forms special 
to the sacred writers," is one to which the 
attention of all students of the English Bible 
may well be called. But more important 
than these technical distinctions is the recog- 
nition of the grace and loveliness with which 
the language of the Bible is often clothed. 
The power to discern this beauty needs to 
be cultivated. " Consider the lilies," said 
the Master. The word seems to mean that 
we are to sit down among them and study 
them, to pore over their loveliness until it 
enters into our souls and takes possession. 
I know not why so many of the fair flowers 
of speech are strewn upon the pages of the 
Book of books, unless it be that their beauty 
is meant to appeal to our thought and to 
give us a high and pure pleasure. Consider 

1 20 



The Rev. Washington Gladden, D.D. 

these blossoms also. This is an integral 
part of the Gospel of God — the revelation 
of beauty. He saves from that which is low 
and base by offering us pleasure in that which 
is high and pure. " Let each one of us/' says 
the Apostle, "please his neighbour for that 
which is good, unto edifying." It is thus 
that we become the children of our Father 
in heaven. And the Book which above all 
others reveals Him, offers to our minds abun- 
dant pleasure in the graces of beautiful speech. 
It may be supposed that such a message 
as the Bible contains could have been de- 
livered to men in language as tame and 
unimaginative as that of the Westminster 
Confession or the Thirty-nine Articles — 
that God's Bible might have contained no 
poetry, no music, no kindling eloquence. 
But such a supposition could not long be en- 
tertained by a thoroughly sane mind. The 

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The Bible and the Child 



truth about God's love for man and man's 
life in God cannot be told in cold, logical 
formularies ; the words into which it is 
poured will glow and burn ; the sentences 
which are charged with it fall into rhythmic 
beat and reverberation. The hope and joy 
and glory of it are the best of it, and these 
cannot be put into logical propositions. The 
creeds are not the Gospel, any more than the 
skeleton is the man. The Gospel is not 
the Gospel when it is separated from the 
forms of beauty with which it came forth 
from the heart of God. 

The question how the children who are 
studying the Bible can be made to discern 
and enjoy this beauty is one to which I am 
not inclined to propose any definite solution. 
The main thing is that those who teach the 
book shall themselves be filled with a sense 
of its beauty ; out of the abundance of the 

122 



The Rev. Washington Gladden^ D.D. 

heart the mouth will speak. It would be 
well for all teachers to study Mr. Moulton's 
book ; but it would not be well for them to 
burden the minds of their pupils with the 
technical distinctions of literary form. 

To read the Bible with the pupils — if 
one can read well — selecting those narra- 
tives which are most dramatic and those 
poems which are most beautiful, is the best 
way of conveying to their minds the sense 
of its beauty. We read so much by chap- 
ters, and study so much by scraps and sen- 
tences, that the sense of literary unities is 
scarcely awakened at all. To read through, 
at one sitting, or continuously, with judi- 
cious omissions, the story of Abraham, or the 
story of Joseph, or the story of Elijah, or 
the story of David, or the story of Ruth — 
not stopping to make many expository com- 
ments, and only pointing out the defective 

123 



The Bible and the Child 



ethical standards which the stories often im- 
ply, when they are judged by Christ's per- 
fect rule — would be a most valuable exercise 
in a Sunday-school class. The narratives 
can be trusted to make their own impression, 
and it would be difficult to find language 
more picturesque or attractive than that in 
which the Bible clothes them. A little maid 
of seven, after listening with interest to the 
reading of Bible stories paraphrased for 
children, said, with a sigh, "Yes, that is 
good ; but I like the real Bible better." 

The reading of the lyrical portions of the 
Bible with young people a little more mature 
might also be profitable. Such magnificent 
odes as the Song of Moses and Miriam, the 
Song of Deborah, the Song of David, should 
be read through with the pupils, and not 
marred or belittled by a word of passing 
comment. To return, after the reading, and 

124 



The Rev. Washington Gladden, D.D. 

call attention to the music of the phrases, 
the march of the rhetoric, and the splendour 
of the imagery, would be judicious. But 
the principal qualification of the teacher is 
the ability to feel, and to express in his own 
reading, the lyrical beauty of the poetry. 
Many of the Psalms and the Prophecies, 
not a few of the discourses of our Lord, and 
notable passages in the Epistles and in the 
Apocalypse, can be treated in the same way. 
The arrangement of these poetical materials 
which Mr. Moulton has given us, in strophe 
and antistrophe, and in what he calls lower 
and higher parallelisms, while sometimes 
fanciful, is, on the whole, very helpful to 
the appreciation of the poetry, and would 
greatly assist the teacher who sought, by 
such a method, to convey to his pupils the 
beauty of the forms in which the saving 
truth of the Bible is expressed. 

I2S 



VII 

The Higher Criticism and the Teach- 
ing of the Young 

y 

By the Rev. Frank C. Porter, Ph.D. 
Professor in Yale Divinity School 



VII 

The question how far the results of the 
historical criticism of the Bible should be 
used in the instruction of children is, for 
those who accept these results, in part a 
question of truth, and in part of expediency ; 
but it is also in part a question of profit, 
and in this aspect I wish to consider it. 
The historical criticism of the Bible means 
the use of its books as historical sources ; 
and this means that the student does not 
value the book simply as a book, but is 
looking for something that lies behind the 
book. The question, not indeed of the right 
— let this be taken for granted — but of the 
worth of criticism resolves itself, therefore, 
into the question, Which is of greater value, 
k 129 



The Bible and the Child 



the book as a book, or the historical facts 
and persons behind the book? Does critical 
study take us from the less to the greater, 
or from the greater to the less ? If it leads 
to the less, we need not trouble children and 
the world at large with it ; if to the greater, 
we must offer the new treasure to all. We 
cannot accept the historian's natural answer 
to the question, for his common fault is an 
over-valuation of his work. To be sure, 
the movement from fiction to fact is a move- 
ment up, but the movement from truth to 
fact is a movement down. It does not 
much matter whence Shakespeare got his 
stories, and how much fact, how much fiction, 
they contain ; and the critic, who must ask 
these questions, should not suppose that he 
is doing the greater thing in answering them. 
Scholars will analyze and excavate in the 
effort to go back of Homer, and decide 

130 



The Rev. Frank C. Porter, Ph.D. 

whether he was one or many, and what was 
fact, what fiction, about Troy and its fall. 
But the story is worth more than the fact 
behind it. It is the universal and the eternal 
in Shakespeare and Homer, not the local 
and temporal, that we wish the child to gain 
and to love. On the other hand, there are 
great events in human history whose sig- 
nificance far surpasses that of their records, 
so that to make our way through records 
to the facts is to go from the less to the 
greater. 

Is the virtue of the Bible, then, like that 
of Homer and Shakespeare in that it lies in 
the books as books, or is the virtue in the 
facts behind the books ? It is in neither 
alone, but in both in very different degrees ; 
and upon the recognition of this fact the 
solution of our problem turns. It is worth 
while to let children accompany the historian 

131 



The Bible and the Child 



as fast and as far as they can, when the events 
and personalities of which a book tells are 
more profitable than the book itself for teach- 
ing, for reproof, for correction, for instruction 
in righteousness. But the discovery that 
every book in the Bible has interest and 
value as a historical source should not lead 
us to suppose that this is the chief interest 
and value of all alike. The historical in- 
terest is, indeed, now somewhat domineering. 
It threatens to deprive us of the free and 
happy appreciation of story as story, of 
poetry as poetry, in its anxiety to know 
facts. In an age of science we must fight 
on every hand for our aesthetic enjoyment, 
our spiritual appreciation of things as they 
are, because we are so possessed by the pas- 
sion to get back to things as they were, and 
as they came to be. 

There is in the Bible much story and 

132 



The Rev. Frank C. Porter, Ph.D. 

poetry which is of value for the spirit that 
is in it more than for the facts that are be- 
hind it. The Hebrew mind expressed its 
religious sentiments and ideals by preference 
in imagery and narrative. The Gospels 
teach us how effective the parable may be as 
the language of religion. And the parable, 
in a large sense, is much more extensively 
used in the Bible than our prosaic minds 
readily perceive. There will be, it is true, 
much diversity of opinion regarding the 
question where the story, where the fact, is 
of greater religious value. Religion may 
demand the actual where art would be con- 
tent with the ideal. But the case is often 
clear. It is of far more use for us to know 
the mind of the writer of Job than the facts 
or traditions with which he deals. It is in 
the book that these get their value. Of 
other poetical books of the Old Testament 

i33 



The Bible and the Child 



the same is true ; of Proverbs, of Ecclesi- 
astes, and of the Psalms. Historical ques- 
tions in the case of these books are peculiarly 
hard, for the very reason that their connec- 
tion with history is so slight. But books in 
the historical form, also, may be more im- 
portant as books than as histories. This is 
especially true when they are not the work 
of individuals, but are formed in a national 
tradition and take into themselves the spirit 
of a people's life. The stories of the begin- 
nings of Israel's history are such products 
of the Israelitish genius. This is the source 
of their perennial charm. These products of 
the youthful spirit of Israel are, indeed, in 
our Bible, mixed with the work of a later age 
and a different spirit. One must read the 
prophetic apart from the priestly narratives 
if he would feel the breath of the dawn of the 
nations life. For this distinction we are 

*34 



The Rev. Frank C. Porter, Ph.D. 

dependent upon the historical critic. Let 
us by all means give to children the advan- 
tage of this distinction in their reading of the 
Bible, and let us explain it to them when 
they ask for the explanation or need it. 
But let not the critic spoil for us, young or 
old, the charm of these stories because he 
does not know how much in them is history 
and how much legend. Let children read 
them as they are, but see that they seize 
upon their spirit, so that if questions of fact 
afterward arise they may feel that their treas- 
ure in the story does not depend upon the 
answer. 

But, on the other hand, the Bible records 
events that are in themselves of the greatest 
religious significance, great as evidences of 
the hand of God in human history, great as 
causes of progress and achievement in the 
religious life of humanity. Such events were 

i3S 



The Bible and the Child 



the exodus from Egypt, the establishment 
of the kingdom of Israel, its division, the fall 
of Samaria, the captivity and the return of 
Judah. In and through these events great 
movements of life and thought were initiated 
in which we are still borne onward — move- 
ments significant not only in their ideal 
contents, but in their historical actuality. 
Whatever the charm of the record, the facts 
are more impressive, and we are more con- 
cerned to know the facts as they were than 
to keep the records as they are. Here his- 
torical science, in passing through the records 
to the facts, contributes to a larger and truer 
faith in God. When criticism pushes aside 
the overgrowth and brings to light some 
hidden flower of rare beauty, its work is of 
far greater value to the spirit of man than 
when it proceeds to pull the flower to pieces. 
Children should be shown the flower, for 

136 



The Rev. Frank C. Porter, Ph.D. 

they cannot find it by themselves; but to 
the deeper knowledge of it loving contem- 
plation is a better way than analysis. 

In the events just mentioned certain actors 
appear — the prophets — in regard to whom 
one hesitates to say whether they disclosed 
the significance of the events, or gave the 
events their significance; whether the events 
or these personalities were the more imme- 
diate work of God. They were certainly the 
supreme flower of Israel's religious life, and 
it is one of the chief contributions of histori- 
cal science to religious faith that it has given 
us a closer view of these men. Yet, just 
here where the religious value of historical 
methods is most evident, it is perhaps hard- 
est to know how to make use of them for 
immature minds. 

Behind the Book of Isaiah, for example, 
stands the prophet Isaiah, who is greater 

i37 



The Bible and the Child 



than the book. Not only for history, but 
for religion, we value the book chiefly as a 
means of acquainting us with one of the 
greatest of the men of faith ; and we are 
ready to do with the book whatever will 
help us to reach the man. But between us 
and Isaiah stands the copyist, and back of 
him the scribe. The Revisers in their pref- 
ace let us know what hard work the copyists 
have made us, and how far textual criticism 
is from having undone all their errors in the 
Old Testament. But the scribes have left 
us a still harder task. Our Book of Isaiah 
is their work, not his. They were wrong in 
ascribing all this material to him. Not only 
chapters 40-66, but parts of chapters 1-39, 
cannot be from Isaiah, nor from Isaiah's age. 
If we would know him, we must set these 
parts aside — not that they are of less value 
for history or for religion than the rest, but 

138 



The Rev. Frank C. Porter, Ph.D. 

that they are not of value in the search for 
Isaiah. Further, the events with reference 
to which Isaiah spoke must be known, the 
background of his time, and even what came 
before and after, the sources and effects of 
his life, if we would know him. And, finally, 
after all this preparation, there is needed 
that sympathetic inward response of soul to 
soul, by which alone one man knows an- 
other. So that our knowledge of Isaiah is 
conditioned on the one side by much diffi- 
cult scientific research, and on the other side 
by our spiritual capacity, our inner relation- 
ship to him. 

Of these two conditions of the right 
understanding and good use of a book of 
Scripture, either one may be overestimated. 
If the condition of scholarship is empha- 
sized, we may be forced to some such posi- 
tion as this. Children and untrained persons 

i39 



The Bible and the Child 



cannot follow the hard path just described, 
even if they have a guide; while the un- 
critical reading of the book will surely lead 
them astray from the true path. It is, there- 
fore, better that they should not read the 
book at all, but should receive its treasures 
at second hand. Let the historical expert, 
through a highly special kind of skilled 
labour, make his way into the presence of 
the great personalities of Biblical history, 
and get from the vision and contact fresh 
moral and religious impulses which shall 
become a part of his own personal life. 
Then let him impart this possession to 
others, not as he gained it, but directly, in 
the language of to-day, and by the height- 
ened power of his own personality. This 
result has actually been reached of late by a 
young German critic. But such intervention 
of the scholar between the Christian and his 

140 



The Rev. Frank C. Porter, Ph.D. 

Bible is as intolerable as the Roman Catho- 
lic intervention of the priest. The learned 
have, as a matter of experience, no such 
advantage over the unlearned in gaining 
from the Scriptures eternal life. Children 
and childlike men are not less fitted than 
others to apprehend and appropriate the 
Christian religion, but, according to the 
testimony of its founder, they are better 
fitted than the wise. 

This brings us to the other condition for 
the right use of the Bible. If childlike 
humility and trust alone are needed, the 
question may arise whether historical science 
is at all worth while, whether it does not 
rather lead one aside from the best uses of 
the book. This, too, has been recently 
maintained in Germany. 1 It has been as- 
serted that what the Bible, as it is, offers to 

1 By Professor Kahler, of Halle 
I 4 I 



The Bible and the Child 



the simple and true-hearted reader is every- 
where of far greater value than anything that 
historical science, with all its uncertainties, 
can discover behind the book ; and that the 
search for the less is a positive hindrance to 
the finding of the greater. 

I believe that in both of these extreme 
views the difficulties of the historical process 
are exaggerated. To be sure, path-breakers 
in the historical field must be rarely equipped, 
but less gifted minds can pursue the path 
when it has once been made, and can recog- 
nize the truth of conclusions which they 
could never have reached alone. The main 
conclusions of the critical school rest, not on 
matters of philological or archaeological de- 
tail, but upon considerations which appeal to 
the common reason of men ; and in propor- 
tion to their importance and security are 
their grounds broad and general and capable 

142 



The Rev. Frank C. Porter, Ph.D. 

of popularization. The common mind is 
more and more accessible to scientific truths 
in their large outlines, and its need is meas- 
ured by its capacity. 

On the other hand, it is true that the sci- 
entific study of the Bible is only preparatory, 
even when the preparation is quite essential, 
to that inward appreciation, that sympathetic 
insight, that response of feeling and will, 
which is a matter of character, not of learn- 
ing. In the reading of no other book does 
this factor play so large a part. One will 
find in the Bible what he has the moral and 
spiritual capacity to find. Yet the prepara- 
tion is essential. Historical criticism is only 
the effort to answer the characteristic intel- 
lectual questions of our age. We cannot 
and would not silence the questions. To 
children they will be even more natural and 
inevitable than they are to us, and children 

143 



The Bible and the Child 



have a right to the best answer we can give. 
It is not in point to say that the past found 
the spiritual treasure of the Bible without 
asking such questions. For our age they are 
vital questions, and they must have our atten- 
tion, whether we are glad or sorry to give it, 
if the book is to keep its old power and gain 
new power over the heart and will of men. 

I would have the child study the Book of 
Isaiah in such a way as to find the man, be- 
lieving that the sight of the man will call 
forth admiration and love, and will be a 
greater power in the child's life, making for 
faith and righteousness, than the book as it 
is could be. 

The heart of the Bible is the Gospels, and 
here our problem centres. Here are books 
of matchless beauty and power, yet behind 
them stands a person who is greater than the 
books. Historical students cannot but try 

144 



The Rev. Frank C. Porter, Ph.D. 

to go back of the books to the person. By 
a comparison of the Gospels with each other, 
they will look for the actual deeds and words 
of Jesus ; by a comparison of these with 
each other they will search for his ruling 
thoughts and purposes; by a study of his 
race and age they will seek for the influences 
that determined the outward course of his 
life and the direction and form of his teach- 
ing, that they may distinguish the new from 
the old, the inward from the outward, the 
spirit from the form. Yet, after all their 
efforts to unveil behind the Gospels the 
features of Christ, what they see will depend 
upon what they are, the sight of Christ 
being still, as it was when he was on earth, 
the testing and the making of character. 
And yet the historical work is a help. The 
clearer our outward vision of Jesus, the 
easier is the inward approach to him, for it is 
l 145 



The Bible and the Child 



oftener true that intellectual difficulties put 
obstacles in the way of the impulse of the 
heart toward Christ, than that the intel- 
lectual view satisfies the mind and stills the 
heart's impulse. 

Children, then, should not be deprived of 
the help that criticism can give in the study 
of the Christ of the Gospels. Indeed, the 
teacher who reads the Gospels in their rela- 
tions to one another, and who puts the life- 
work of Jesus in its historical setting, will 
not be able to teach the youngest person 
without using, directly or indirectly, the light 
derived from these studies. At an early age 
the life and words of Jesus should be studied 
by the comparison of parallel accounts in the 
different Gospels. The study of the Gospels 
in their individuality should come afterwards. 
The first search is for Christ himself. Let 
the peculiarities of each Gospel be left aside 

146 



The Rev. Frank C. Porter, Ph.D. 

at first, and let attention be given to the 
material common to two or more Gospels. 
The use of Stevens and Burton's Harmony of 
the Gospels for Historical Study or of Waddy's 
Harmony of the Four Gospels 1 in Sunday- 
schools is, I believe, advisable. The ad- 
vantages of such comparative study of the 
Gospels are many. Most obviously it brings 
us nearer to the very words and deeds of 
Jesus. It suggests the answer to many 
questions that perplex the child's mind as 
well as the man's. It imparts the right view 
of Scripture as a whole, freeing the child at 
the outset from that bondage to the letter 
from which many have broken away only to 
lose, with the letter, the spiritual treasure 
which is nowhere else to be found. 

1 The Revised Version is used in both ; the former gives important 
parallels in foot-notes which do not fall into a harmonistic scheme ; the 
latter gives aid to the comparison of the text in detail. 

H7 



The Bible and the Child 



Further, the child should be taught the 
outward and inward conditions of the life of 
Christ. He could early read such a book as 
Morrison's Jews under Roman Rule with in- 
terest. And the habit of viewing the life of 
Jesus in its historical connections could easily 
be formed. By such a view one's sense of 
the uniqueness of Christ is heightened, and, 
on the other hand, the distinction between 
the form and the spirit, between the tem- 
poral and the eternal, in the earthly life of 
Jesus is more readily perceived. 

These two things the child should learn 
— to find Christ in the Gospels, and to find 
the Eternal in Christ. When he has done 
this, he has solved in essence the problem 
of his religious life, and he has solved also 
in principle the lesser problem of the Bible 
and its use. 

The vision of the person of Christ is the 

148 



The Rev. Frank C. Porter, Ph.D. 

end of all Biblical study, and by its relation 
to the end all else is to be understood ; the 
vision of Christ within, but behind and above 
the Gospels : within, so that he may be found 
by one who reads the Gospels as they are 
with a childlike heart ; but behind, so that 
if the veil of writing be somewhat pushed 
apart, his form will be more fully disclosed ; 
and yet again above, so that when we see 
him and hear him as he was, we still need 
to translate his words and deeds out of the 
language of a certain age and race into the 
universal language of the spirit, that we 
may hear him speaking not to others but 
to us. 

It is the great service of the historical 
criticism of the Bible, that of the Old Tes- 
tament as well as that of the New, that it 
gives help, which is to the modern mind 
indispensable, to the more direct vision and 

149 



The Bible and the Child 



deeper apprehension of Christ. One to 
whom it renders this service will not with- 
hold it from children, and will not do harm 
by its misuse. 

150 



VIII 

The Bible as Rearranged by Modern 
Criticism 

By the Rev. Lyman Abbott, D.D. 



VIII 

I imagine before me a class of intelligent 
boys and girls from twelve years of age and 
upwards. They have studied something of 
ancient history, and know something of the 
growth of nations. To this class of boys 
and girls I address myself in this article, 
endeavouring to tell them, as far as it is 
possible so to do within the compass of so 
brief an article, what the modern scholar 
thinks about the construction and growth 
of the Old Testament. 1 

More than three thousand years ago, 
before Virgil or Horace had written their 

1 Of course all scholars are not agreed. The views here embodied 
may be defined, perhaps, as those of the more conservative of the 
modern school. 

153 



The Bible and the Child 



poems, or Cicero or Demosthenes had de- 
livered their orations ; before Caesar had 
crossed the Rubicon, or Alexander had rid- 
den Bucephalus, or the Greeks had met the 
Persians at the battle of Marathon ; yes ! 
before Homer had sung the songs which 
bear his name, or Trojan and Greek had 
met in battle about the walls of Troy ; when 
everywhere government was despotism, and 
religion was superstition — there dwelt, in 
a most horrible form of slavery, a singular 
people, in a province of Egypt. By a series 
of remarkable deliverances they were set free 
from bondage, and, crossing a northern arm 
of the Red Sea and traversing the wilderness 
of Arabia, encamped in a great plain at the 
foot of one of the majestic and awful moun- 
tains in the south of the Arabian Peninsula. 
Here their great leader and prophet gave 
them their constitution. It was at once 

*54 



The Rev. Lyman Abbott^ D.D. 

political and religious. It was very simple 
and yet it was very radical. The Egyptians, 
from whose land this people had come forth, 
worshipped a great multitude of gods. Their 
learned men, indeed, said to one another that 
there really is but one God, and that the 
deities whom the people worshipped were 
but manifestations of him, if they were not 
merely imaginations of the people. This 
belief, however, they kept to themselves. 
Moses, by his declarations, made it the 
common faith of the children of Israel. 
" Hear, O Israel," he said ; " Jehovah your 
God is one God." He told them further 
that this God was a righteous God ; that 
He demanded righteousness of His children, 
and that He demanded nothing else. This 
seems very simple to us now, but it was very 
strange and very radical doctrine in the 
world then. Founded on this simple prin- 
ts 



The Bible and the Child 



ciple, he gave this people their religious and 
political constitution. It is known in He- 
brew history as the Book of the Covenant, 
and is contained in the 20th, 21st, 22d, and 
23 d chapters of the Book of Exodus. 1 This, 
with the possible exception of a few odes 
and songs, is probably the most ancient 
writing in the Bible ; it is certainly its most 
ancient teaching. It contains the famous 
Ten Commandments ; which declare that 
the people should reverence God, honour 
their parents, respect each other's rights of 
person, the family, property, and reputation. 
These simple principles it elaborates and ap- 
plies with a number of specific illustrations. 
It contains no directions to perform sacri- 
fices, no instruction respecting ritualism, and 
makes no provision for a priesthood. 

1 By some believed to begin with xx. 23, and not to include the 
Ten Commandments. 



i 5 6 



The Rev. Lyman Abbott, D.D. 

The Israelites, after spending a number 
of years in the wilderness, entered upon a 
campaign against the inhabitants of Canaan 
and took possession of their land. The 
story of this campaign is written in the 
Book of Joshua. There followed a period 
of nearly three centuries, which we may de- 
scribe as colonial days, the story of which is 
contained in the Book of Judges and the first 
part of the Book of Samuel. During this 
time there was no true capital, indeed no 
true nation. There were a variety of sepa- 
rate provinces, having almost as little com- 
mon life as the American colonies before the 
formation of the Constitution of the United 
States. In war these colonies united ; in 
peace they separated from each other again. 
At length, weary of perpetual jealousy and 
strife, and desirous of emulating the exam- 
ple of other nations about them, they estab- 

iS7 



The Bible and the Child 



lished a monarchy, and David came as the 
second king to the throne. In many re- 
spects David resembles King Alfred the 
Great of England. He had a profoundly 
religious nature, and it found expression in 
odes and psalms so striking, if not so numer- 
ous, that they have given his name to the 
Hebrew hymn-book. He was a great war- 
rior, and in his early life the leader of an 
irresponsible band of outlaws, though always 
an intense patriot. He had a profoundly 
religious spirit, and a capacity for states- 
manship and a power of organization very 
remarkable. Under his forty years of ad- 
ministration the colonies were welded into 
one measurably harmonious nation. How 
this nation grew in wealth and splendour, 
but not in real prosperity, under Solomon, 
the foolish wise king ; how it split in sunder 
under his son ; how its divided life was sub- 

158 



The Rev. Lyman Abbott^ D.D. 

sequently carried on in two separate histori- 
cal currents, as the life of Israel and the life 
of Judah ; how the land became the battle- 
ground of contending nations — Egypt on 
the south, Assyria, Persia, Babylon, and 
Chaldea on the east ; how at last the Israel- 
ites were carried away captive, dispersed, and 
have disappeared from human history ; how 
a little later the Jews, or inhabitants of Judaea, 
were also carried away captive, but retained 
their religious faith and their distinctive 
characteristics in the land of their captivity, 
is told in the Books of Kings and Chroni- 
cles. And how of the latter there returned, 
after seventy years of exile, a number of im- 
migrants to rebuild Jerusalem and take up 
again the story of national life, the mere 
remnant of a nation, and under adverse cir- 
cumstances, is told in the Books of Ezra 
and Nehemiah. 

iS9 



The Bible and the Child 



During the progress of this history there 
were two religious forces at work among this 
people, very much as during later history in 
Europe. These two forces may be charac- 
terized as the ecclesiastical and the non- 
ecclesiastical, the priestly and the prophetic. 
In European history the priestly tendency 
was largely represented by the Roman Catho- 
lic Church, the prophetic by the Reformed or 
Protestant Churches ; in England the priestly 
by the High Church party in the Established 
Church, the prophetic by the Puritan and 
Wesleyan movements ; in New England the 
priestly or ecclesiastical by the Puritan estab- 
lished church, and the prophetical or non- 
ecclesiastical by the Baptists, the Quakers, 
and the Independents. But in every church 
and in every community both elements are 
more or less to be seen — sometimes sharply 
separated, sometimes closely commingled. 

1 60 



The Rev. Lyman Abbott, D.D. 

During the period of Jewish history both 
these elements grew up together. Moses 
had probably at the close of his life deliv- 
ered a farewell address analogous in some 
respects to the famous farewell address of 
Washington. Traditions of this address 
had been preserved, possibly in documents, 
more probably in oral reports. In that age 
of the world oral tradition was far more en- 
during and trustworthy than it is in our 
time, when we trust to written and printed 
records in place of verbal memory. In one 
of the great reformations which occurred in 
Jewish history an unknown prophet, desirous 
to revive the moral law and re-establish its 
sanctity, gathered together these traditions 
and recast them in a book which he called 
The Second Giving of the Law. It was 
dramatically represented as being Moses' 
farewell address, though the author did not 
m 161 



The Bible and the Child 



intend to deceive, nor, in fact, did deceive, 
the people of the age in which the book 
appeared. This is the Book of Deuter- 
onomy, supposed to have been written about 
eight hundred years after the death of Moses. 
It has very little to say about church observ- 
ances and a great deal to say about practical 
righteousness. It embodies the prophetic 
or non-ecclesiastical religious teaching which 
had descended from Moses and had been 
kept alive in the nation by his successors. 

Meanwhile, a very different religious life 
had been developed in this nation — the 
priestly or ecclesiastical. From a very early 
period in human history, so remote that 
scholars do not know when the practice 
began, it has been the custom among pagan 
people to express their religious sentiments, 
whether of gratitude for the goodness of the 
gods, of penitence for sin against the gods, 

162 



The Rev. Lyman Abbott^ D.D. 

of desire for the forgiveness of the gods, or 
of consecration to the service of the gods, 
by sacrifices. Sometimes these have been of 
great magnitude, hundreds of cattle being 
slain at once. Not infrequently human 
sacrifices have been offered to appease the 
wrath or win the favour of supposed deities. 
The Jewish ecclesiastical law accepted this 
custom and embodied it in the Jewish ritual, 
but it made two radical changes : it declared 
that the value of the sacrifice depended, not 
on the value of the article sacrificed, but on 
the spirit of the person offering it ; and it 
laid stress upon the truth that there was no 
legal obligation to offer such services, that 
to be of any value they must be the free-will 
offering of the worshipper, and must express 
his real and sincere sentiment. " He shall 
offer it of his own voluntary will at the door 
of the tabernacle of the congregation before 

163 



The Bible and the Child 



the Lord/' was the fundamental provision 
of the ecclesiastical code. But as time went 
on, these sacrifices, which at first were very 
simple, grew more and more elaborate. A 
temple was constructed where they were to 
be offered. Probably at first custom, event- 
ually law, forbade offering them anywhere 
else. At first a father might offer for his 
family, or a king for his people, but later 
the priesthood took the whole control of 
the sacrificial system, and no offerings were 
counted legitimate except those which passed 
through the hands of the priesthood. This 
code, which was nearly a thousand years in 
growing up, was finally embodied in a series 
of written regulations, most of which were 
contained in the Book of Leviticus, but 
some also in Exodus and some in Num- 
bers. This code, so strangely different from 
the simple moral law of the Book of the 

164 



The Rev. Lyman Abbott, D.D. 

Covenant and the second giving of the law 
— the Book of Deuteronomy — embodies 
the priestly or ecclesiastical life of the nation 
as it had grown up in and around the Tem- 
ple in Jerusalem during a thousand years. 

While this growth was taking place in the 
prophetic and in the ecclesiastical life of the 
kingdom, there was also growing up among 
the Jews a literature. The most notable 
portion of this literature consisted of ser- 
mons or addresses delivered by men who 
were at once preachers, reformers, and states- 
men. They fulfilled this threefold function 
much as John Calvin did in Geneva, as Knox 
did in Scotland, and as the Puritan preachers 
did in New England. The preacher in a 
theocracy is the public counsellor both of 
the officers and of the people. These ser- 
mons or addresses — sometimes they were 
songs sung to the accompaniment of a harp, 

165 



The Bible and the Child 



and often were poetic in their form — were, 
in the course of time, collected under the 
names of the principal preachers. The 
book, however, not infrequently bore the 
name of one preacher, while it contained 
utterances of several. This is especially the 
case with the Book of Isaiah and with that 
of Zechariah. In such a case the principal 
author gave his name to the entire collection. 
Many of these prophecies are unintelligible, 
or almost unintelligible, to the reader of our 
ordinary English Bible, because he does not 
know the historical conditions under which 
they were uttered. His state of mind in 
respect to them is like that of one who 
should read Daniel Webster's reply to 
Hayne without knowing that there was a 
United States of America and a threatened 
movement to nullify the National laws, if 
not to secede from the Nation. 

1 66 



The Rev. Lyman Abbott, D.D. 

The hymns of the Jewish nation which 
grew up through the long period of its his- 
tory from the time of David, if not from 
the time of Moses, down almost to the time 
of Christ, were gathered together, as in our 
day hymns in common use are gathered 
together in hymn-books. This Hebrew 
hymn-book is known as the Book of Psalms. 
I have no doubt that David contributed 
some of the most beautiful of these Psalms 
to the collection, though this is doubted by 
some scholars. But it is quite certain that 
a majority of them were written at a much 
later date, and many of them while the Jews 
were captives in Babylon, or after their return 
to the Holy Land. The other books of 
the Old Testament would be classified in 
ordinary literature, probably, as belles-lettres. 
How far those which are historical in their 
form have a historical basis of truth we 

167 



The Bible and the Child 



cannot now judge. They are to be regarded, 
however, as literature, not as history. Such 
is the Book of Ruth — a beautiful idyl of 
the colonial days, illustrating the sincerity 
and simplicity of woman's love ; the Book 
of Esther — a dramatic story, illustrating 
woman's courage and glowing with splendid 
patriotism ; the Book of Job, which has been 
well called an " epic of the inner life," and 
which some eminent critics have characterized 
as the noblest poem in literature; the Book 
of Ecclesiastes — in appearance a monologue, 
but in reality a dialogue, in which "The 
Two Voices " in man, as Tennyson calls 
them, the voice of cynicism and that of 
spiritual hope, struggle for victory ; and the 
Song of Solomon — a love drama in which a 
maiden resists all the flatteries and blandish- 
ments of the king who would make her 
queen of his harem, and remains faithful to 

168 



The Rev. Lyman Abbott > D.D. 

her peasant lover, to whom at last she returns 
in purity and happiness. To these must be 
added the Book of Proverbs, a collection of 
the wise sayings and apophthegms which 
grew up in the nation during the thousand 
years of its history, and which took the name 
of Solomon because of his historic reputation 
for worldly wisdom. Had it been written 
by one man, we might have described him 
as the Benjamin Franklin of his age and 
community. Finally, we must add, last of 
all, though the date of its composition is 
uncertain, the Book of Genesis ; that is, the 
Book of Origins. This was written late in 
Hebrew history, as a kind of introduction to 
the historical books. In it the author takes 
the legends of a pre-historic time as he finds 
them floating in tradition of his own and 
other nations, and rewrites them, writing 
God and Divine truth into them, somewhat 

169 



The Bible and the Child 



as Tennyson took the Arthurian legends 
and rewrote them in The Idylls of the King> 
sometimes interpreting moral beauty which 
he discovered in them, sometimes imparting 
to them moral beauty which they did not 
before possess. 

This is the Old Testament. It is a col- 
lection of Hebrew literature ; it includes law, 
history, hymnody, drama, fiction, poetry, 
and moral and religious teaching; perhaps 
I might say sermons. Its earliest important 
writing is the Book of the Covenant ; its 
latest, probably some of the Psalms. Its 
Book of Deuteronomy is an elaboration and 
amplification of the political and religious 
instruction of the founder of the common- 
wealth. Its Book of Leviticus is an elabo- 
ration of the liturgical code which grew up 
during eight hundred years or more of 
church life. Its literature is as various and 

170 



The Rev. Lyman Abbott, D.D. 

as splendid as can be found in that of any- 
other nation in an equal length of time, 
though not as voluminous. And the whole 
collection is pervaded by the great, simple, 
inspiring religious ideas that there is one 
God, that He is a righteous God, that He 
demands righteousness of His children, and 
that if they desire righteousness He will for- 
give their sins and help them to become 
worthy to be called His children. This 
message to Israel by its prophets, this mes- 
sage of Israel to the world, this revelation of 
God and His righteousness and His redeem- 
ing love, constitute the value of a book which 
has not only no peer, but nothing parallel or 
analogous to it in this respect in the litera- 
ture of the world, and make it a fitting 
preparation for the New Testament, in which 
this revelation of God reaches its climax in 
the life of Jesus Christ. 

171 



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